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Contents

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GENESIS

THE PRIME SOURCE for the biblical verses quoted in The Twelfth Planet is the Old Testament in its original Hebrew text. It must be borne in mind that all the translations consulted of which the principal ones are listed at the end of the book - are just that: translations or interpretations. In the final analysis, what counts is what the original Hebrew says.

In the final version quoted in The Twelfth Planet, I have compared the available translations against each other and against the Hebrew source and the parallel Sumerian and Akkadian texts/tales, to come up with what I believe is the most accurate rendering.

The rendering of Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite texts has engaged a legion of scholars for more than a century.

Decipherment of script and language was followed by transcribing, transliterating, and finally, translating. In many instances, it was possible to choose between differing translations or interpretations only by verifying the much earlier transcriptions and transliterations. In other instances, a late insight by a contemporary scholar could throw new light on an early translation.

The list of sources for Near Eastern texts, given at the end of this book, thus ranges from the oldest to the newest, and is followed by the scholarly publications in which valuable contributions to the understanding of the texts were found.

THE OLD TESTAMENT has filled my life from childhood. When the seed for this book was planted, nearly fifty years ago, I was totally unaware of the then raging Evolution versus Bible debates. But as a young schoolboy studying Genesis in its original Hebrew, I created a confrontation of my own. We were reading one day in Chapter VI that when God resolved to destroy Mankind by the Great Flood, "the sons of the deities", who married the daughters of men, were upon the Earth.

The Hebrew original named them Nefilim; the teacher explained it meant "giants"; but I objected: didn't it mean literally "Those Who Were Cast Down", who had descended to Earth? I was reprimanded and told to accept the traditional interpretation.

In the ensuing years, as I have learned the languages and history and archaeology of the ancient Near East, the Nefilim became an obsession. Archaeological finds and the deciphering of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Canaanite and other ancient texts and epic tales increasingly confirmed the accuracy of the biblical references to the kingdoms, cities, rulers, places, temples, trade routes, artifacts, tools and customs of antiquity. Is it not now time, therefore, to accept the word of these same ancient records regarding the Nefilim as visitors to Earth from the heavens?

The Old Testament repeatedly asserted: "The throne of Yahweh is in heaven" - "from heaven did the Lord behold the Earth". The New Testament spoke of "Our Father, which art in Heaven". But the credibility of the Bible was shaken by the advent and general acceptance of Evolution. If Man evolved, then surely he could not have been created all at once by a Deity who, premeditating, had suggested "Let us make Adam in our image and after our likeness".

All the ancient peoples believed in gods who had descended to Earth from the heavens and who could at will soar heavenwards. But these tales were never given credibility, having been branded by scholars from the very beginning as myths.

The writings of the ancient Near East, which include a profusion of astronomical texts, clearly speak of a planet from which these astronauts or "gods" had come. However, when scholars, fifty and one hundred years ago, deciphered and translated the ancient lists of celestial bodies, our astronomers were not yet aware of Pluto (which was only located in 1930). How then could they be expected to accept the evidence of yet one more member of our solar system? But now that we too, like the ancients, are aware of the planets beyond Saturn, why not accept that ancient evidence for the existence of the Twelfth Planet?

As we ourselves venture into space, a fresh look and an acceptance of the ancient scriptures is more than timely. Now that astronauts have landed on the Moon, and unmanned spacecraft explore other planets, it is no longer impossible to believe that a civilization on another planet more advanced than ours was capable of landing its astronauts on the planet Earth some time in the past.

Indeed, a number of popular writers have speculated that ancient artifacts such as the pyramids and giant stone sculptures must have been fashioned by advanced visitors from another planet - for surely primitive man could not have possessed by himself the required technology? How was it, for another example, that the civilization of Sumer seemed to flower so suddenly nearly 6,000 years ago without a precursor?

But since these writers usually fail to show when, how and, above all, from where such ancient astronauts did come - their intriguing questions remain unanswered speculations.

It has taken thirty years of research, of going back to the ancient sources, of accepting them literally, to re-create in my own mind a continuous and plausible scenario of prehistoric events. The Twelfth Planet, therefore, seeks to provide the reader with a narrative giving answers to the specific questions of When, How, Why and Wherefrom.

The evidence I adduce consists primarily of the ancient texts and pictures themselves.

In The Twelfth Planet I have sought to decipher a sophisticated cosmogony which explains, perhaps as well as modern scientific theories, how the solar system could have been formed, an invading planet caught into solar orbit, and Earth and other parts of the solar system brought into being.

The evidence I offer includes celestial maps dealing with space flight to Earth from that Planet, the Twelfth. Then, in sequence, follow the dramatic establishment of the first settlements on Earth by the Nefilim: their leaders were named; their relationships, loves, jealousies, achievements and struggles described; the nature of their "immortality" explained.

Above all, The Twelfth Planet aims to trace the momentous events that led to the creation of Man, and the advanced methods by which this was accomplished.

It then suggests the tangled relationship between Man and his lords, and throws fresh light on the meaning of the events in the Garden of Eden, of the Tower of Babel, of the great Flood. Finally, Man - endowed by his makers biologically and materially- - ends up crowding his gods off the Earth.

This book suggests that we are not alone in our solar system. Yet it may enhance rather than diminish the faith in a universal Almighty. For, if the Nefilim created Man on Earth, they may have only been fulfilling a vaster Master Plan.

Z. SITCHIN

New York, February 1977

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THE ENDLESS BEGINNING

OF THE EVIDENCE that we have amassed to support our conclusions, exhibit number one is Man himself. In many ways, modern man - Homo sapiens - is a stranger to Earth.

Ever since Charles Darwin shocked the scholars and theologians of his time with the evidence of evolution, life on Earth has been traced through Man and the primates, mammals, and vertebrates, and backward through ever-lower life forms to the point, billions of years ago, at which life is presumed to have begun.

But having reached these beginnings and having begun to contemplate the probabilities of life elsewhere in our solar system and beyond, the scholars have become uneasy about life on Earth: Somehow, it does not belong here.

If it began through a series of spontaneous chemical reactions,

• • Why does life on Earth have but a single source, and not a multitude of chance sources?

  • And why does all living matter on Earth contain too little of the chemical elements that abound on Earth, and too much of those that are rare on our planet?

  • Was life, then, imported to Earth from elsewhere?

Man's position in the evolutionary chain has compounded the puzzle.

Finding a broken skull here, a jaw there, scholars at first believed that Man originated in Asia some 500,000 years ago. But as older fossils were found, it became evident that the mills of evolution grind much, much slower. Man's ancestor apes are now placed at a staggering 25,000,000 years ago. Discoveries in East Africa reveal a transition to manlike apes (hominids) some 14,000,000 years ago. It was about 11,000,000 years later that the first ape-man worthy of the classification Homo appeared there.

The first being considered to be truly manlike - "Advanced Australopithecus" - existed in the same parts of Africa some 2,000,000 years ago. It took yet another million years to produce Homo erectus. Finally, after another 900,000 years, the first primitive Man appeared; he is named Neanderthal after the site where his remains were first found.

In spite of the passage of more than 2,000,000 years between Advanced Australopithecus and Neanderthal, the tools of these two groups - sharp stones - were virtually alike; and the groups themselves (as they are believed to have looked) were hardly distinguishable.

Then, suddenly and inexplicably, some 35,000 years ago, a new race of Men - Homo sapiens ("thinking Man") - appeared as if from nowhere, and swept Neanderthal Man from the face of Earth.

These modern Men - named Cro-Magnon - looked so much like us that, if dressed like us in modern clothes, they would be lost in the crowds of any European or American city. Because of the magnificent cave art which they created, they were at first called "cavemen." In fact, they roamed Earth freely, for they knew how to build shelters and homes of stones and animal skins wherever they went.

For millions of years, Man's tools had been simply stones of useful shapes. Cro-Magnon Man, however, made specialized tools and weapons of wood and bones. He was no longer a "naked ape," for he used skins for clothing. His society was organized; he lived in clans with a patriarchal hegemony.

His cave drawings bespeak artistry and depth of feeling; his drawings and sculptures evidence some form of "religion," apparent in the worship of a Mother Goddess, who was sometimes depicted with the sign of the Moon's crescent. He buried his dead, and must therefore have had some philosophies regarding life, death, and perhaps even an afterlife.

As mysterious and unexplained as the appearance of Cro-Magnon Man has been, the puzzle is still more complicated. For, as other remains of modern Man were discovered (at sites including Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Montmaria), it became apparent that Cro-Magnon Man stemmed from an even earlier Homo sapiens who lived in western Asia and North Africa some 2500000 years before Cro-Magnon Man.

The appearance of modem Man a mere 700,000 years after Homo erectus and some 200,000, years before Neanderthal Man is absolutely implausible. It is also clear that Homo sapiens represents such an extreme departure from the slow evolutionary process that many of our features, such as the ability to speak, are totally unrelated to the earlier primates.

An outstanding authority on the subject, Professor Theodosius Dobzhansky (Mankind Evolving), was especially puzzled by the fact that this development took place during a period when Earth was going through an ice age, a most unpropitious time for evolutionary advance.

Pointing out that Homo sapiens lacks completely some of the peculiarities of the previously known types, and has some that never appeared before, he concluded:

"Modern man has many fossil collateral relatives but no progenitors; the derivation of Homo sapiens, then, becomes a puzzle."

How, then, did the ancestors of modern Man appear some 300,000 years ago - instead of 2,000,000 or 3,000,000

years in the future, following further evolutionary development? Were we imported to Earth from elsewhere, or were we, as the Old Testament and other ancient sources claim, created by the gods?

We now know where civilization began and how it developed, once it began. The unanswered question is: Why - why did civilization come about at all? For, as most scholars now admit in frustration, by all data Man should still be without civilization. There is no obvious reason that we should be any more civilized than the primitive tribes of the Amazon jungles or the inaccessible parts of New Guinea,

But, we are told, these tribesmen still live as if in the Stone Age because they have been isolated. But isolated from what? If they have been living on the same Earth as we, why have they not acquired the same knowledge of sciences and technologies on their own as we supposedly have?

The real puzzle, however, is not the backwardness of the Bushmen, but our advancement; for it is now recognized that in the normal course of evolution Man should still be typified by the Bushmen and not by us. It took Man some 2,000,000 years to advance in his "tool industries" from the use of stones as he found them to the realization that he could chip and shape stones to better suit his purposes.

Why not another 2,000,000 years to learn the use of other materials, and another 10,000,000 years to master mathematics and engineering and astronomy? Yet here we are, less than 50,000 years from Neanderthal Man, landing astronauts on the Moon.

The obvious question, then, is this: Did we and our Mediterranean ancestors really acquire this advanced civilization on our own?

Though Cro-Magnon Man did not build skyscrapers nor use metals, there is no doubt that his was a sudden and revolutionary civilization. His mobility, ability to build shelters, his desire to clothe himself, his manufactured tools, his art - all were a sudden high civilization breaking an endless beginning of Man's culture that stretched over millions of years and advanced at a painfully slow pace.

Though our scholars cannot explain the appearance of Homo sapiens and the civilization of Cro-Magnon Man, there is by now no doubt regarding this civilization's place of origin: the Near East.

The uplands and mountain ranges that extend in a semiarc from the Zagros Mountains in the east (where present-day Iran and Iraq border on each other), through the Ararat and Taurus ranges in the north, then down, westward and southward, to the hill lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, are replete with caves where the evidence of prehistoric but modern Man has been preserved.

One of these caves, Shanidar, is located in the northeastern part of the semiarc of civilization.

Nowadays, fierce Kurdish tribesmen seek shelter in the area's caves for themselves and their flocks during the cold winter months. So it was, one wintry night 44,000 years ago, when a family of seven (one of whom was a baby) sought shelter in the cave of Shanidar.

Their remains - they were evidently crushed to death by a rockfall - were discovered in 1957 by a startled Ralph

Solecki, who went to the area in search of evidence of early Man (Professor Solecki has told me that nine skeletons were found, of which only four were crushed by rockfall.) What he found was more than he expected. As layer upon layer of debris was removed, it became apparent that the cave preserved a clear record of Man's habitation in the area from about 100,000 to some 13,000 years ago.

What this record showed was as surprising as the find itself. Man's culture has shown not a progression but a regression. Starting from a certain standard, the following generations showed not more advanced but less advanced standards of civilized life. And from about 27,000 B.C. to 11,000 B.C., the regressing and dwindling population reached the point of an almost complete absence of habitation. For reasons that are assumed to have been climatic, Man was almost completely gone from the whole area for some 16,000 years.

And then, circa 11,000 B.C., "thinking Man" reappeared with new vigor and on an inexplicably higher cultural level.

It was as if an unseen coach, watching the faltering human game, dispatched to the field a fresh and better-trained team to take over from the exhausted one.

Throughout the many millions of years of his endless beginning, Man was nature's child; he subsisted by gathering the foods that grew wild, by hunting the wild animals, by catching wild birds and fishes. But just as Man's settlements were thinning out, just as he was abandoning his abodes, when his material and artistic achievements were disappearing - just then, suddenly, with no apparent reason and without any prior known period of gradual preparation - Man became a farmer.

Summarizing the work of many eminent authorities on the subject, R. J. Braidwood and B. Howe (Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan) concluded that genetic studies confirm the archaeological finds and leave no doubt that agriculture began exactly where Thinking Man had emerged earlier with his first crude civilization: in the Near East. There is no doubt by now that agriculture spread all over the world from the Near Eastern arc of mountains and highlands.

Employing sophisticated methods of radiocarbon dating and plant genetics, many scholars from various fields of science concur in the conclusion that Man's first farming venture was the cultivation of wheat and barley, probably through the domestication of a wild variety of emmer. Assuming that, somehow, Man did undergo a gradual process of teaching himself how to domesticate, grow, and farm a wild plant, the scholars remain baffled by the profusion of other plants and cereals basic to human survival and advancement that kept coming out of the Near East.

These included, in rapid succession, millet, rye, and spelt, among the edible cereals; flax, which provided fibers and edible oil; and a variety of fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. In every instance, the plant was undoubtedly domesticated in the Near East for millennia before it reached Europe. It was as though the Near East were some kind of genetic-botanical laboratory, guided by an unseen hand, producing every so often a newly domesticated plant.

The scholars who have studied the origins of the grapevine have concluded that its cultivation began in the mountains around northern Mesopotamia and in Syria and Palestine. No wonder. The Old Testament tells us that Noah "planted a vineyard" (and even got drunk on its wine) after his ark rested on Mount Ararat as the waters of the Deluge receded.

The Bible, like the scholars, thus places the start of vine cultivation in the mountains of northern Mesopotamia.

Apples, pears, olives, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts - all originated in the Near East and spread from there to Europe and other parts of the world. Indeed, we cannot help recalling that the Old Testament preceded our scholars by several millennia in identifying the very same area as the world's first orchard:

"And the Lord God planted an orchard in Eden, in the east... And the Lord God caused; to grow, out of the ground, every tree that is pleasant to behold and that is good for eating."

The general location of "Eden" was certainly known to the biblical generations. It was "in the east" - east of the Land of Israel. It was in a land watered by four major rivers, two of which are the Tigris and the Euphrates.

There can be no doubt that the Book of Genesis located the first orchard in the highlands where these rivers originated, in northeastern Mesopotamia. Bible and science are in full agreement.

As a matter of fact, if we read the original Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis not as a theological but as a scientific text, we find that it also accurately describes the process of plant domestication. Science tells us that the process went from wild grasses to wild cereals to cultivated cereals, followed by fruit-bearing shrubs and trees.

This is exactly the process detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.

And the Lord said:

"Let the Earth bring forth grasses;

cereals that by seeds produce seeds;

fruit trees that bear fruit by species,

which contain the seed within themselves."

And it was so:

The Earth brought forth grass;

cereals that by seed produce seed, by species;

and trees that bear fruit, which contain

the seed within themselves, by species.

The Book of Genesis goes on to tell us that Man, expelled from the orchard of Eden, had to toil hard to grow his food.

"By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," the Lord said to Adam.

It was after that that "Abel was a keeper of herds and Cain was a tiller of the soil." Man, the Bible tells us, became a shepherd soon after he became a farmer.

Scholars are in full agreement with this biblical sequence of events. Analyzing the various theories regarding animal domestication, F. E. Zeuner (Domestication of Animals) stresses that Man could not have,

"acquired the habit of keeping animals in captivity or domestication before he reached the stage of living in social units of some size."

Such settled communities, a prerequisite for animal domestication, followed the changeover to agriculture.

The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, and not necessarily as Man's best friend but probably also for food. This, it is believed, took place circa 9500 B.C. The first skeletal remains of dogs have been found in Iran, Iraq, and Israel.

Sheep were domesticated at about the same time; the Shanidar cave contains remains of sheep from circa 9000 B.C., showing that a large part of each year's young were killed for food and skins. Goats, which also provided milk, soon followed; and pigs, horned cattle, and hornless cattle were next to be domesticated.

In every instance, the domestication began in the Near East.

The abrupt change in the course of human events that occurred circa 11,000 B.C. in the Near East (and some 2,000 years later in Europe) has led scholars to describe that time as the clear end of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) and the beginning of a new cultural era, the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic).

The name is appropriate ,only if one considers Man's principal raw material - which continued to be stone. His dwellings in the mountainous areas were still built of stone; his communities were protected by stone walls; his first agricultural implement - the sickle - was made of stone.

He honored or protected his dead by covering and adorning their graves with stones; and he used stone to make images of the supreme beings, or "gods," whose benign intervention he sought. One such image, found in northern Israel and dated to the ninth millennium B.C., shows the carved head of a "god" shielded by a striped helmet and wearing some kind of "goggles."

From an overall point of view, however, it would be more appropriate to call the age that began circa 11,000 B.C. not the Middle Stone Age but the Age of Domestication.- Within the span of a mere 3,600 years - overnight in terms of the endless beginning - Man became a fanner, and wild plants and animals were domesticated.

Then, a new age clearly followed.

Our scholars call it the New Stone Age (Neolithic); but the term is totally inadequate, for the main change that had taken place circa 7500 B.C. was the appearance of pottery.

For reasons that still elude our scholars - but which will become clear as we unfold our tale of prehistoric events - Man's march toward civilization was confined, for the first several millennia after 11,000 B.C., to the highlands of the Near East. The discovery of the many uses to which clay could be put was contemporary with Man's descent from his mountain abodes toward the lower, mud-filled valleys.

By the seventh millennium B.C., the Near Eastern arc of civilization was teeming with clay or pottery cultures, which produced great numbers of utensils, ornaments, and statuettes. By 5000 B.C., the Near East was producing clay and pottery objects of superb quality and fantastic design.

But once again progress slowed, and by 4500 B.C., archaeological evidence indicates, regression was all around. Pottery became simpler. Stone utensils - a relic of the Stone Age - again became predominant. Inhabited sites reveal fewer remains.

Some sites that had been centers of pottery and clay industries began to be abandoned, and distinct clay manufacturing disappeared.

"There was a general impoverishment of culture," according to James Melaart (Earliest Civilizations of the Near East); some sites clearly bear the marks of "the new poverty-stricken phase."

Man and his culture were clearly on the decline.

Then - suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably - the Near East witnessed the blossoming of the greatest civilization imaginable, a civilization in which our own is firmly rooted.

A mysterious hand once more picked Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of culture, knowledge, and civilization.

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THE SUDDEN CIVILIZATION

FOR A LONG TIME, Western man believed that his civilization was the gift of Rome and Greece. But the Greek philosophers themselves wrote repeatedly that they had drawn on even earlier sources. Later on, travelers returning to Europe reported the existence in Egypt of imposing pyramids and temple-cities half-buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called sphinxes.

When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these ancient monuments. One of his officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.

The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed to Western man that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization. Egyptian records spoke of royal dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C. - two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilization. Reaching its maturity in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Greece was a latecomer rather than an originator.

Was the origin of our civilization, then, in Egypt?

As logical as that conclusion would have seemed, the facts militated against it. Greek scholars did describe visits to Egypt, but the ancient sources of knowledge of which they spoke were found elsewhere. The pre-Hellenic cultures of the Aegean Sea - the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland - revealed evidence that the Near Eastern, not the Egyptian, culture had been adopted. Syria and Anatolia, not Egypt, were the principal avenues through which an earlier civilization became available to the Greeks.

Noting that the Dorian invasion of Greece and the Israelite invasion of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt took place at about the same time (circa the thirteenth century B.C.), scholars have been fascinated to discover a growing number of similarities between the Semitic and Hellenic civilizations.

Professor Cyrus H. Gordon (Forgotten Scripts; Evidence for the Minoan Language) opened up a new field of study by showing that an early Minoan script, called Linear A, represented a Semitic language.

He concluded that "the pattern (as distinct from the content) of the Hebrew and Minoan civilizations is the same to a remarkable extent," and pointed out that the island's name, Crete, spelled in Minoan Ke-re-ta, was the same as the Hebrew word Ke-re-et ("walled city") and had a counterpart in a Semitic tale of a king of Keret.

Even the Hellenic alphabet, from which the Latin and our own alphabets derive, came from the Near East. The ancient Greek historians themselves wrote that a Phoenician named Kadmus ("ancient") brought them the alphabet, comprising the same number of letters, in the same order, as in Hebrew; it was the only Greek alphabet when the Trojan War took place. The number of letters was raised to twenty-six by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century B.C.

That Greek and Latin writing, and thus the whole foundation of our Western culture, were adopted from the Near East can easily be demonstrated by comparing the order, names, signs, and even numerical values of the original Near Eastern alphabet with the much later ancient Greek and the more recent Latin.

The scholars were aware, of course, of Greek contacts with the Near East in the first millennium B.C., culminating with the defeat of the Persians by Alexander the Macedonian in 331 B.C.

Greek records contained much information about these Persians and their lands (which roughly paralleled today's Iran). Judging by the names of their kings - Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes - and the names of their deities, which appear to belong to the Indo-European linguistic stem, scholars reached the conclusion that they were part of the Aryan ("lordly") people that appeared from somewhere near the Caspian Sea toward the end of the second millennium B.C. and spread westward to Asia Minor, eastward to India, and southward to what the Old Testament called the "lands of the Medes and Parsees."

Yet all was not that simple. In spite of the assumed foreign origin of these invaders, the Old Testament treated them as part and parcel of biblical events. Cyrus, for example, was considered to be an "Anointed of Yahweh" - quite an unusual relationship between the Hebrew God and a non-Hebrew.

According to the biblical Book of Ezra, Cyrus acknowledged his mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and stated that he was acting upon orders given by Yahweh, whom he called "God of Heaven." Cyrus and the other kings of his dynasty called themselves Achaemenids - after the title adopted by the founder of the dynasty, which was Hacham-Anish.

It was not an Aryan but a perfect Semitic title, which meant "wise man."

By and large, scholars have neglected to investigate the many leads that may point to similarities between the Hebrew God Yahweh and the deity Achaemenids called "Wise Lord," whom they depicted as hovering in the skies within a Winged Globe, as shown on the royal seal of Darius.

It has been established by now that the cultural, religious, and historic roots of these Old Persians go back to the earlier empires of Babylon and Assyria, whose extent and fall is recorded in the Old Testament.

The symbols that make up the script that appeared on the Achaemenid monuments and seals were at first considered to be decorative designs. Engelbert Kampfer, who visited Persepolis, the Old Persian capital, in 1686, described the signs as "cuneates," or wedge-shaped impressions. The script has since been known as cuneiform.

As efforts began to decipher the Achaemenid inscriptions, it became clear that they were written in the same script as inscriptions found on ancient artifacts and tablets in Mesopotamia, the plains and highlands that lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Intrigued by the scattered finds, Paul Emile Botta set out in 1843 to conduct the first major purposeful excavation.

He selected a site in northern Mesopotamia, near present-day Mosul, now called Khorsabad. Botta was soon able to establish that the cuneiform inscriptions named the place Dur Sharru Kin. They were Semitic inscriptions, in a sister language of Hebrew, and the name meant "walled city of the righteous king." Our textbooks call this king Sargon II.

This capital of the Assyrian king had as its center a magnificent royal palace whose walls were lined with sculptured bas-reliefs, which, if placed end to end, would stretch for over a mile.

Commanding the city and the royal compound was a step pyramid called a ziggurat; it served as a "stairway to Heaven" for the gods.

The layout of the city and the sculptures depicted a way of life on a grand scale.

The palaces, temples, houses, stables, warehouses, walls, gates, columns, decorations, statues, artworks, towers, ramparts, terraces, gardens - all were completed in just five years. According toGeorges Contenau (La Vie Quotidienne a Babylone et en Assyrie), "the imagination reels before the potential strength of an empire which could accomplish so much in such a short space of time," some 3,000 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the French, the English appeared on the scene in the person of Sir Austen Henry Layard, who selected as his site a place some ten miles down the Tigris River from Khorsabad. The natives called it Kuyunjik; it turned out to be the Assyrian capital of Nineveh.

Biblical names and events had begun to come to life. Nineveh was the royal capital of Assyria under its last three great rulers: Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurhanipal.

"Now, in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the walled cities of Judah," relates the Old Testament (II Kings 18:13), and when the Angel of the Lord smote his army, "Sennacherib departed and went back, and dwelt in Nineveh."

The mounds where Nineveh was built by Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal revealed palaces, temples, and works of art that surpassed those of Sargon.

The area where the remains of Esarhaddon's palaces are believed to lie cannot be excavated, for it is now the site of a Muslim mosque erected over the purported burial place of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale when he refused ID bring Yahweh's message to Nineveh.

Layard had read in ancient Greek records that an officer in Alexander's army saw a "place of pyramids and remains of an ancient city" - a city that was already buried in Alexander's time! Layard dug it up, too, and it turned out to be Nimrud, Assyria's military center. It was there that Shalmaneser II set up an obelisk to record his military expeditions and conquests. Now on exhibit at the British Museum, the obelisk lists, among the kings who were made to pay tribute, "Jehu, son of Omri, king of Israel."

Again, the Mesopotamian inscriptions and biblical texts supported each other!

Astounded by increasingly frequent corroboration of the biblical narratives by archaeological finds, the Assyriologists, as these scholars came to be called, turned to the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis. There Nimrod - "a mighty hunter by the grace of Yahweh" - was des6ribed as the founder of all the kingdoms of Mesopotamia.

And the beginning of his kingdom:

Babel and Erech and Akkad, all in the Land of Shin'ar.

Out of that Land there emanated Ashur where

Nineveh was built, a city of wide streets; and Khalah, and Ressen - the great city

which is between Nineveh and Khalah.

There were indeed mounds the natives called Calah, lying between Nineveh and Nimrud.

When teams under W. Andrae excavated the area from 1903 to 1914, they uncovered the ruins of Ashur, the Assyrian religious center and its earliest capital. Of all the Assyrian cities mentioned in the Bible, only Ressen remains to be found. The name means "horse's bridle"; perhaps it was the location of the royal stables of Assyria.

At about the same time as Ashur was being excavated, teams under R. Koldewey were completing the excavation of Babylon, the biblical Babel - a vast place of palaces, temples, hanging gardens, and the inevitable ziggurat. Before long, artifacts and inscriptions unveiled the history of the two competing empires of Mesopotamia: Babylonia and Assyria, the one centered in the south, the other in the north.

Rising and falling, fighting and coexisting, the two constituted a high civilization that encompassed some 1,500 years, both rising circa 1900 B.C.

Ashur and Nineveh were finally captured and destroyed by the Babylonians in 614 and 612 B.C., respectively. As predicted by the biblical prophets, Babylon itself came to an inglorious end when Cyrus the Achaemenid conquered it in 539 B.C.

Though they were rivals throughout their history, one would be hard put to find any significant differences between Assyria and Babylonia in cultural or material matters. Even though Assyria called its chief deity Ashur ("all-seeing") and Babylonia hailed Marduk ("son of the pure mound"), the pantheons were otherwise virtually alike.

Many of the world's museums count among their prize exhibits the ceremonial gates, winged bulls, bas-reliefs, chariots, tools, utensils, jewelry, statues, and other objects made of every conceivable material that have been dug out of the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia.

But the true treasures of these kingdoms were their written records:

thousands upon thousands of inscriptions in the cuneiform script, including cosmologic tales, epic poems, histories of kings, temple records, commercial contracts, marriage and divorce records, astronomical tables, astrological forecasts, mathematical formulas, geographic lists, grammar and vocabulary school texts, and, not least of all, texts dealing with the names, genealogies, epithets, deeds, powers, and duties of the gods.

The common language that formed the cultural, historical, and religious bond between Assyria and Babylonia was Akkadian. It was the first known Semitic language, akin to but predating Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, and Canaanite. But the Assyrians and Babylonians laid no claim to having invented the language or its script; indeed, many of their tablets bore the postscript that they had been copied from earlier originals.

Who, then, invented the cuneiform script and developed the language, its precise grammar and rich vocabulary? Who wrote the "earlier originals"? And why did the Assyrians and Babylonians call the language Akkadian?

Attention once more focuses on the Book of Genesis. And the beginning of his kingdom: Babel and Erech and Akkad." Akkad - could there really have been such a royal capital, preceding Babylon and Nineveh?

The ruins of Mesopotamia have provided conclusive evidence that once upon a time there indeed existed a kingdom by the name of Akkad, established by a much earlier ruler, who called himself a sharrukin ("righteous ruler"). He claimed in his inscriptions that his empire stretched, by the grace of his god Enlil, from the Lower Sea (the Persian Gulf) .to the Upper Sea (believed to be the Mediterranean). He boasted that "at the wharf of Akkad, he made moor ships" from many distant lands.

The scholars stood awed: They had come upon a Mesopotamian empire in the third millennium B.C.! There was a leap - backward - of some 2,000 years from the Assyrian Sargon of Dur Sharrukin to Sargon of Akkad. And yet the mounds that were dug up brought to light literature and art, science and politics, commerce and communications - a full-fledged civilization - long before the appearance of Babylonia and Assyria. Moreover, it was obviously the predecessor and the source of the later: Mesopotamian civilizations; Assyria and Babylonia were only branches off the Akkadian trunk.

The mystery of such an early Mesopotamian civilization deepened, however, as inscriptions recording the achievements and genealogy of Sargon of Akkad were found. They stated that his full title was "King of Akkad, King of Kish"; they explained that before he assumed the throne, he had been a counselor to the "rulers of Kish." Was there, then - the scholars asked themselves- - an even earlier kingdom, that of Kish, which preceded Akkad?

Once again, the biblical verses gained in significance.

And Kush begot Nimrod;

He was first to be a Hero in the Land....

And the beginning of his kingdom:

Babel and Erech and Akkad.

Many scholars have speculated that Sargon of Akkad was the biblical Nimrod.

If one reads "Kish" for "Kush" in the above biblical verses, it would seem Nimrod was indeed preceded by Kish, as claimed by Sargon. The scholars then began to accept literally the rest of his inscriptions:

"He defeated Uruk and tore down its wall ... he was victorious in the battle with the inhabitants of Ur... he defeated the entire territory from Lagash as far as the sea."

Was the biblical Erech identical with the Uruk of Sargon's inscriptions? As the site now called Warka was unearthed, that was found to be the case. And the Ur referred to by Sargon was none other than the biblical Ur, the Mesopotamian birthplace of Abraham.

Not only did the archaeological discoveries vindicate the biblical records; it also appeared certain that there must have been kingdoms and cities and civilizations in Mesopotamia even before the third millennium B.C. The only question was: How far back did one have to go to find the first civilized kingdom?

The key that unlocked the puzzle was yet another language.

Scholars quickly realized that names had a meaning not only in Hebrew and in the Old Testament but throughout the ancient Near East. All the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian names of persons and places had a meaning. But the names of rulers that preceded Sargon of Akkad did not make sense at all: The king at whose court Sargon was a counselor was called Urzababa; the king who reigned in Erech was named Lugalzagesi; and so on.

Lecturing before the Royal Asiatic Society in 1853, Sir Henry Rawlinson pointed out that such names were neither Semitic nor Indo-European; indeed,

"they seemed to belong to no known group of languages or peoples."

But if names had a meaning, what was the mysterious language in which they had the meaning?

Scholars took another look at the Akkadian inscriptions. Basically, the Akkadian cuneiform script was syllabic: Each sign stood for a complete syllable (ab, ba, bat, etc.).

Yet the script made extensive use of signs that were not phonetic syllables but conveyed the meanings "god," "city," "country," or "life," "exalted," and the like. The only possible explanation for this phenomenon was that these signs were remains of an earlier writing method which used pictographs. Akkadian, then, must have been preceded by another language that used a writing method akin to the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

It was soon obvious that an earlier language, and not lust an earlier form of writing, was involved here. Scholars found that Akkadian inscriptions and texts made extensive use of loanwords - words borrowed intact from another language (in the same way that a modern Frenchman would borrow the English word weekend). This was especially true where scientific or technical terminology was involved, and also in matters dealing with the gods and the heavens.

One of the greatest finds of Akkadian texts was the ruins of a library assembled in Nineveh by Ashurbanipal; Layard and his colleagues carted away from the site 25,000 tablets, many of which were described by the ancient scribes as copies of "olden texts." A group of twenty-three tablets ended with the statement: "23rd tablet: language of Shumer not changed."

Another text bore an enigmatic statement by Ashurbanipal himself:

The god of scribes has bestowed on me the gift of the knowledge of his art.

I have been initiated into the secrets of writing.

I can even read the intricate tablets in Shumerian;

I understand the enigmatic words in the stone carvings from the days before the Flood.

The claim by Ashurbanipal that he could read intricate tablets in "Shumerian" and understand the words written on tablets from "the days before the Flood" only increased the mystery.

But in January 1869 Jules Oppert suggested to the French Society of Numismatics and Archaeology that recognition be given to the existence of a pre-Akkadian language and people. Pointing out that the early rulers of Mesopotamia proclaimed their legitimacy by taking the title "King of Sumer and Akkad," he suggested that the people be called "Sumerians," and their land, "Sumer."

Except for mispronouncing the name - it should have been Shumer, not Sumer - Oppert was right. Sumer was not a mysterious, distant land, but the early name for southern Mesopotamia, just as the Book of Genesis had clearly stated: The royal cities of Babylon and Akkad and Erech were in "the Land of Shin'ar." (Shinar was the biblical name for Shumer.)

Once the scholars had accepted these conclusions, the flood gates were opened. The Akkadian references to the • "olden texts" became meaningful, and scholars soon realized that tablets with long columns of words were in fact Akkadian-Sumerian lexicons and dictionaries, prepared in Assyria and Babylonia for their own study of the first written language, Sumerian.

Without these dictionaries from long ago, we would still be far from being able to read Sumerian.

With their aid, a vast literary and cultural treasure opened up. It also became clear that the Sumerian script, originally pictographic and carved in stone in vertical columns, was then turned horizontally and, later on, stylized for wedge writing on soft clay tablets to become the cuneiform writing that was adopted by the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and other nations of the ancient Near East.

The decipherment of the Sumerian language and script, and the realization that the Sumerians and their culture were the fountainhead of the Akkadian - Babylonian-Assyrian achievements, spurred archaeological searches in southern Mesopotamia.

All the evidence now indicated that the beginning was there.

The first significant excavation of a Sumerian site was begun in 1877 by French archaeologists; and the finds from this single site were so extensive that others continued to dig there until 1933 without completing the job.

Called by the natives Telloh ("mound"), the site proved to be an early Sumerian city, the very Lagash of whose conquest Sargon of Akkad had boasted. It was indeed a royal city whose rulers bore the same title Sargon had adopted, except that it was in the Sumerian language: EN.SI ("righteous ruler"). Their dynasty had started circa 2900 B.C. and lasted for nearly 650 years. During this time, forty-three ensi’s reigned without interruption in Lagash: Their names, genealogies, and lengths of rule were all neatly recorded.

The inscriptions provided much information. Appeals to the gods "to cause the grain sprouts to grow for harvest ... to cause the watered plant to yield grain," attest to the existence of agriculture and irrigation.

A cup inscribed in honor of a goddess by "the overseer of the granary" indicated that grains were stored, measured, and traded.

An ensi named Eannatum left an inscription on a clay brick which makes it clear that these Sumerian rulers could assume the throne only with the approval of the gods. He also recorded the conquest of another city, revealing to us the existence of other city-states in Sumer at the beginning of the-third millennium B.C.

Eannatum's successor, Entemena, wrote of building a temple and adorning it with gold and silver, planting gardens, enlarging brick-lined wells. He boasted of building a fortress with watchtowers and facilities for docking ships.

One of the better-known rulers of Lagash was Gudea. He had a large number of statuettes made of himself, all showing him in a votive stance, praying to his gods. This stance was no pretense: Gudea had indeed devoted himself to the adoration of Ningirsu, his principal deity, and to the construction and rebuilding of temples.

His many inscriptions reveal that, in the search for exquisite building materials, he obtained gold from Africa and Anatolia, silver from the Taurus Mountains, cedars from Lebanon, other rare woods from Ararat, copper from the Zagros range, diorite from Egypt, carnelian from Ethiopia, and other materials from lands as yet unidentified by scholars.

When Moses built for the Lord God a "Residence" in the desert, he did so according to very detailed instructions provided by the Lord. When King Solomon built the first Temple in Jerusalem, he did so after the Lord had "given him wisdom."

The prophet Ezekiel was shown very detailed plans for the Second Temple,

"in a Godly vision" by a "person who had the appearance of bronze and who Held in his hand a flaxen string and a measuring rod."

Ur-Nammu, ruler of Ur, depicted in an earlier millennium how his god, ordering him to build for him a temple and giving him the pertinent instructions, handed him the measuring rod and rolled string for the job.

Twelve hundred years before Moses, Gudea made the ,same claim.

The instructions, he recorded in one very long inscription, were given to him in a vision. "A man that shone like the heaven," by whose side stood "a divine bird," "commanded me to build his temple." This "man," who "from the crown on his head was obviously a god," was later identified as the god Ningirsu.

With him was a goddess who "held the tablet of her favorable star of the heavens"; her other hand "held a holy stylus," with which she indicated to Gudea "the favorable planet." A third man, also a god, held in his hand a tablet of precious stone; "the plan of a temple it contained."

One of Gudea's statues shows him seated, with this tablet on his knees; on the tablet the divine drawing can clearly be seen.

Wise as he was, Gudea was baffled by these architectural instructions, and he sought the advice of a goddess who could interpret divine messages.

She explained to him the meaning of the instructions, the plan's measurements, and the size and shape of the bricks to be used. Gudea then employed a male "diviner, maker of decisions" and a female "searcher of secrets" to locate the site, on the city's outskirts, where the god wished his temple to be built. He then recruited 216,000 people for the construction job.

Gudea's bafflement can readily be understood, for the simple-looking "floor plan" supposedly gave him the necessary information to build a complex ziggurat, rising high by seven stages. Writing in Der Alte Orient in 1900, A-Billerbeck was able to decipher at least part of the divine architectural instructions.

The ancient drawing, even on the partly damaged statue, is accompanied at the top by groups of vertical lines whose number diminishes as the space between them increases. The divine architects, it appears, were able to provide, with a single floor plan, accompanied by seven varying scales, the complete instructions for the construction of a seven-stage high-rise temple.

It has been said that 'war spurs Man to scientific and material breakthroughs. In ancient Sumer, it seems, temple construction spurred the people and their rulers into greater technological achievements.

The ability to carry out major construction work according to prepared architectural plans, to organize and feed a huge labor force, to flatten land and raise mounds, to mold bricks and transport stones, to bring rare metals and other materials from afar, to east metal and shape utensils and ornaments - all clearly speak of a high civilization, already in full bloom in the third millennium B.C.

As masterful as even the earliest Sumerian temples were, they represented but the tip of the iceberg of the scope and richness of the material achievements of the first great civilization known to Man.

In addition to the invention and development of writing, without which a high civilization could not have come about, the Sumerians should also be credited with the invention of printing. Millennia before Johann Gutenberg "invented" printing by using movable type, Sumerian scribes used ready-made "type" of the various pictographic signs, which they used as we now use rubber stamps to impress the desired sequence of signs in the wet clay.

They also invented the forerunner of our rotary presses - the cylinder seal. Made of extremely hard stone, it was a small cylinder into which the message or design had been engraved in reverse; whenever the seal was rolled on the wet clay, the imprint created a "positive" impression on the clay.

The seal also enabled one to assure the authenticity of documents; a new impression could be made at once to compare it with the old impression on the document.

Many Sumerian and Mesopotamian written records concerned themselves not necessarily with the divine or spiritual but with such daily tasks as recording crops, measuring fields, and calculating prices.

Indeed, no high civilization would have been possible without a parallel advanced system of mathematics.

The Sumerian system, called sexagesimal, combined a mundane 10 with a "celestial" 6 to obtain the base figure 60. This system is in some respects superior to our present one; in any case, it is unquestionably superior to later Greek and Roman systems. It enabled the Sumerians to divide into fractions and multiply into the millions, to calculate roots or raise numbers several powers.

This was not only the first-known mathematical system but also one that gave us the "place" concept: Just as, in the decimal system, 2 can be 2 or 20 or 200, depending on the digit's place, so could a Sumerian 2 mean 2 or 120 (2 x 60), and so on, depending on the "place."

The 360-degree circle, the foot and its 12 inches, and the "dozen" as a unit are but a few examples of the vestiges of Sumerian mathematics still evident in our daily life.

Their concomitant achievements in astronomy, the establishment of a calendar, and similar mathematical-celestial feats will receive much closer study in coming chapters.

Just as our own economic and social system - our books, court and tax records, commercial contracts, marriage certificates, and so on - depends on paper, Sumerian/ Mesopotamian life depended on clay. Temples, courts, and trading houses had their scribes ready with tablets of wet clay on which to inscribe decisions, agreements, letters, or calculate prices, wages, the area of a field, or the number of bricks required in a construction.

Clay was also a crucial raw material for the manufacture of utensils for daily use and containers for storage and transportation of goods. It was also used to make bricks - another Sumerian "first," which made possible the building of houses for the people, palaces for the kings, and imposing temples for the gods.

The Sumerians are credited with two technological breakthroughs that made it possible to combine lightness with tensile strength for all clay products: reinforcing and firing. Modern architects have discovered that reinforced concrete, an extremely strong building material, can be created by pouring cement into molds containing iron rods; long ago, the Sumerians gave their bricks great strength by mixing the wet clay with chopped reeds or straw.

They also knew that clay products could be given tensile strength and durability by firing them in a kiln. The world's first high-rise buildings and archways, as well as durable ceramic wares, were made possible by these technological breakthroughs.

The invention of the kiln - a furnace in which intense but controllable temperatures could be attained without the risk of contaminating products with dust or ashes - made possible an even greater technological advance: the Age of Metals.

It has been assumed that man discovered that he could hammer "soft stones" - naturally occurring nuggets of gold as well as copper and silver compounds - into useful or pleasing shapes, sometime about 6000 B.C. The first hammered-metal artifacts were found in the highlands of the Zagros and Taurus mountains.

However, as R. J. Forbes (The Birthplace of Old World Metallurgy) pointed out, "in the ancient Near East, the supply of native copper was quickly exhausted, and the miner had to turn to ores." This required the knowledge and ability to find and extract the ores, crush them, then smelt and refine them - processes that could not have been carried out without kiln-type furnaces and a generally advanced technology.

The art of metallurgy soon encompassed the ability to alloy copper with other metals, resulting in a castable, hard, but malleable metal we call bronze. The Bronze Age,, our first metallurgical age, was also a Mesopotamian contribution to modern civilization. Much of ancient commerce was devoted to the metals trade; it also formed the basis for the development in Mesopotamia of banking and the first money - the silver shekel ("weighed ingot").

The many varieties of metals and alloys for which Sumerian and Akkadian names have been found and the extensive technological terminology attest to the high level of metallurgy in ancient Mesopotamia. For a while this puzzled the scholars because Sumer, as such, was devoid of metal ores, yet metallurgy most definitely began there.

The answer is energy. Smelting, refining, and alloying, as well as casting, could not be done without ample supplies of fuels to fire the kilns, crucibles, and furnaces. Mesopotamia may have lacked ores, but it had fuels in abundance. So the ores were brought to the fuels, which explains many early inscriptions describing the bringing of metal ores from afar.

The fuels that made Sumer technologically supreme were bitumens and asphalts, petroleum products that naturally seeped up to the surface in many places in Mesopotamia. R. J. Forbes (Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity) shows that the surface deposits of Mesopotamia were the ancient world's prime source of fuels from the earliest times to the Roman era.

His conclusion is that the technological use of these petroleum products began in Sumer circa 3500 B.C.; indeed, he shows that the use and knowledge of the fuels and their properties were greater in Sumerian times than in later civilizations.

So extensive was the Sumerian use of these petroleum products - not only as fuel but also as road-building materials, for waterproofing, caulking, painting, cementing, and molding - that when archaeologists searched for ancient Ur they found it buried in a mound that the local Arabs called "Mound of Bitumen." Forbes shows that the Sumerian language had terms for every genus and variant of the bituminous substances found in Mesopotamia.

Indeed, the names of bituminous and petroleum materials in other languages - Akkadian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit - can clearly be traced to the Sumerian origins; for example, the most common word for petroleum - naphta - derives from napatu ("stones that flare up").

The Sumerian use of petroleum products was also basic to an advanced chemistry. We can judge the high level of Sumerian knowledge not only by the variety of paints and pigments used and such processes as glazing but also by the remarkable artificial production of semiprecious stones, including a substitute for lapis lazuli.

Bitumens were also used in Sumerian medicine, another field where the standards were impressively high. The hundreds of Akkadian texts that have been found employ Sumerian medical terms and phrases extensively, pointing to the Sumerian origin of all Mesopotamian medicine.

The library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh included a medical section. The texts were divided into three groups - bultitu ("therapy"), shipir bel imti ("surgery") and urti mashmashshe ("commands and incantations"). Early law codes included sections dealing with fees payable to surgeons for successful operations, and penalties to be imposed on them in case of failure: A surgeon, using a lancet to open a patient's temple, was to lose his hand if he accidentally destroyed the patient's eye.

Some skeletons found in Mesopotamian graves bore unmistakable marks of brain surgery. A partially broken medical text speaks of the surgical removal of a "shadow covering a man's eye," probably a cataract; another text mentions the use of a cutting instrument, stating that "if the sickness has reached the inside of the bone, you shall scrape and remove."

Sick persons in Sumerian times could choose between an A.ZU ("water physician") and an IA.ZU ("oil physician"). A tablet excavated in Ur, nearly 5,000 years old, names a medical practitioner as "Lulu, the doctor." There were also veterinarians - known either as "doctors of oxen" or as "doctors of asses."

A pair of surgical tongs is depicted on a very early cylinder seal, found at Lagash, that belonged to "Urlugale-dina, the doctor." The seal also shows the serpent on a tree - the symbol of medicine to this day. An instrument that was used by midwives to cut the umbilical cord was also frequently depicted.

Sumerian medical texts deal into diagnosis and prescriptions. They leave no doubt that the Sumerian physician did not resort to magic or sorcery. He recommended cleaning and washing; soaking in baths of hot water and mineral solvents; application of vegetable derivatives; rubbing with petroleum compounds.

Medicines were made from plant and mineral compounds and were mixed with liquids or solvents appropriate to the method of application. If taken by mouth, the powders were mixed into wine, beer, or honey; if "poured through the rectum" - administered in an enema - they were mixed with plant or vegetable oils. Alcohol, which plays such an important role in surgical disinfection and as a base for many medicines, reached our languages through the Arabic kohl, from the Akkadian kuhlu.

Models of livers indicate that medicine was taught at medical schools with the aid of clay models of human organs. Anatomy must have been an advanced science, for temple rituals called for elaborate dissections of sacrificial animals - only a step removed from comparable knowledge of human anatomy.

Several depictions on cylinder seals or clay tablets show people lying on some kind of surgical table, surrounded by teams of gods or people. We know from epics and other heroic texts that the Sumerians and their successors in Mesopotamia were concerned with matters of life, sickness, and death. Men like Gilgamesh, a king of Erech, sought the "Tree of Life" or some mineral (a "stone") that could provide eternal youth.

There were also references to efforts to resurrect the dead, especially if they happened to be gods:

Upon the corpse, hung from the pole,

they directed the Pulse and the Radiance;

Sixty times the Water of Life,

Sixty times the Food of Life,

they sprinkled upon it;

And Inanna arose.

Were some ultramodern methods, about which we can only speculate, known and used in such revival attempts?

That radioactive materials were known and used to treat certain ailments is certainly suggested by a scene of medical treatment depicted on a cylinder seal dating to the very beginning of Sumerian civilization.

It shows, without question, a man lying on a special bed; his face is protected by a mask, and he is being subjected to some kind of radiation.

One of Sumer's earliest material achievements was the development of textile and clothing industries.

Our own Industrial Revolution is considered to have commenced with the introduction of spinning and weaving machines in England in the 1760s. Most developing nations have aspired ever since to develop a textile industry as the first step toward industrialization. The evidence shows that this has been the process not only since the eighteenth century but ever since man's first great civilization.

Man could not have made woven fabrics before the advent of agriculture, which provided him with flax, and the domestication of animals, creating a source for wool. Grace M. Crowfoot (Textiles, Basketry and Mats in Antiquity) ex-pressed the scholastic consensus by stating that textile weaving appeared first in Mesopotamia, around 3800 B.C.

Sumer, moreover, was renowned in ancient times not only for its woven fabrics, but also for its apparel. The Book of Joshua (7:21) reports that during the storming of Jericho a certain person could not resist the temptation to keep "one good coat of Shin'ar," which he had found in the city, even though the penalty was death. So highly prized were the garments of Shinar (Sumer), that people were willing to risk their lives to obtain them.

A rich terminology already existed in Sumerian times to describe both items of clothing and their makers. The basic garment was called TUG - without doubt, the forerunner in style as well as in name of the Roman toga.

Such garments were TUG.TU.SHE, which in Sumerian meant "garment which is worn wrapped around.”

The ancient depictions reveal not only an astonishing variety and opulence in matters of clothing, but also elegance, in which good taste and coordination among clothes, hairdos, headdresses, and jewelry prevailed.

Another major Sumerian achievement was its agriculture. In a land with only seasonal rains, the rivers were enlisted to water year-round crops through a vast system of irrigation canals.

Mesopotamia - the Land Between the Rivers - was a veritable food basket in ancient times.

The apricot tree, the Spanish word for which is damasco ("Damascus tree"), bears the Latin name armeniaca, a loanword from the Akkadian armanu. The cherry - kerasos in Greek, Kirsche in German - originates from the Akkadian karshu. All the evidence suggests that these and other fruits and vegetables reached Europe from Mesopotamia.

So did many special seeds and spices: Our word saffron comes from the Akkadian azupiranu, crocus from kurkanu (via krokos in Greek), cumin from kamanu, hyssop from zupu, myrrh from murru. The list is long; in many instances, Greece provided the physical and etymological bridge by which these products of the land reached Europe.

Onions, lentils, beans, cucumbers, cabbage, and lettuce were common ingredients of the Sumerian diet.

What is equally impressive is the extent and variety of the ancient Mesopotamian food-preparation methods, their cuisine. Texts and pictures confirm the Sumerian knowledge of converting the cereals they had grown into flour, from which they made a variety of leavened and unleavened breads, porridges, pastries, cakes, and biscuits.

Barley was also fermented to produce beer; "technical manuals" for beer production have been found among the texts. Wine was obtained from grapes and from date palms. Milk was available from sheep, goats, and cows; it was used as a beverage, for cooking, and for converting into yogurt, butter, cream, and cheeses. Fish was a common part of the diet. Mutton was readily available, and the meat of pigs, which the Sumerians tended in large herds, was considered a true delicacy. Geese and ducks may have been reserved for the gods' tables.

The ancient texts leave no doubt that the haute cuisine of ancient Mesopotamia developed in the temples and in the service of the gods.

One text prescribed the offering to the gods of,

"loaves of barley bread... loaves of emmer bread; a paste of honey and cream; dates, pastry... beer, wine, milk... cedar sap, cream."

Roasted meat was offered with libations of "prime beer, wine, and milk."

A specific cut of a bull was prepared according to a strict recipe, calling for "fine flour... made to a dough in water, prime beer, and wine," and mixed with animal fats, "aromatic ingredients made from hearts of plants," nuts, malt, and spices. Instructions for "the daily sacrifice to the gods of the city of Uruk" called for the serving of five different beverages with the meals, and specified what "the millers in the kitchen" and "the chef working at the kneading trough" should do.

Our admiration for the Sumerian culinary art certainly grows as we come across poems that sing the praises of fine foods. Indeed, what can one say when one reads a millennia-old recipe for "coq au vin":

In the wine of drinking, In the scented water, In the oil of unction - This bird have I cooked, and have eaten.

A thriving economy, a society with such extensive material enterprises could not have developed without an efficient system of transportation. The Sumerians used their two great rivers and the artificial network of canals for waterborne transportation of people, goods, and cattle. Some of the earliest depictions show what were undoubtedly the world's first boats.

We know from many early texts that the Sumerians also engaged in deep-water seafaring, using a variety of ships to reach faraway lands in search of metals, rare woods and stones, and other materials unobtainable in Sumer proper. An Akkadian dictionary of the Sumerian language was found to contain a section on shipping, listing 105 Sumerian terms for various ships by their size, destination, or purpose (for cargo, for passengers, or for the exclusive use of certain gods).

Another 69 Sumerian terms connected with the manning and construction of ships were translated into the Akkadian. Only a long seafaring tradition could have produced such specialized vessels and technical terminology.

For overland transportation, the wheel was first used in Sumer.

Its invention and introduction into daily life made possible a variety of vehicles, from carts to chariots, and no doubt also granted Sumer the distinction of having been the first to employ "ox power" as well as "horse power" for locomotion.

In 1956 Professor Samuel N. Kramer, one of the great Sumerologists of our time, reviewed the literary legacy found beneath the mounds of Sumer.

The table of contents of From the Tablets of Sumer is a gem in itself, for each one of the twenty-five chapters described a Sumerian "first," including the first schools, the first bicameral congress, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first "farmer's almanac," the first cosmogony and cosmology, the first "Job," the first proverbs and sayings, the first literary debates, the first "Noah," the first library catalogue; and Man's first Heroic Age, his first law codes and social reforms, his first medicine, agriculture, and search for world peace and harmony.

This is no exaggeration.

The first schools were established in Sumer as a direct outgrowth of the invention and introduction of writing. The evidence (both archaeological, such as actual school buildings, and written, such as exercise tablets) indicates the existence of a formal system of education by the beginning of the third millennium B.C.

There were literally thousands of scribes in Sumer, ranging from junior scribes to high scribes, royal scribes, temple scribes, and scribes who assumed high state office. Some acted as teachers at the schools, and we can still read their essays on the schools, their aims and goals, their curriculum and teaching methods.

The schools taught not only language and writing but also the sciences of the day - botany, zoology, geography, mathematics, and theology. Literary works of the past were studied and copied, and new ones were composed.

The schools were headed by the ummia ("expert professor"), and the faculty invariably included not only a "man in charge of drawing" and a "man in charge of Sumerian," but also a "man in charge of the whip." Apparently, discipline was strict; one school alumnus described on a clay tablet how he had been flogged for missing school, for insufficient neatness, for loitering, for not keeping silent, for misbehaving, and even for not having neat handwriting.

An epic poem dealing with the history of Erech concerns itself with the rivalry between Erech and the city-state of Kish. The epic text relates how the envoys of Kish proceeded to Erech, offering a peaceful settlement of their dispute. But the ruler of Erech at the time, Gilgamesh, preferred to fight rather than negotiate.

What is interesting is that he had to put the matter to a vote in the Assembly of the Elders, the local "Senate":

The lord Gilgamesh,

Before the elders of his city put the matter,

Seeks out the decision:

"Let us not submit to the house of Kish,

let us smite it with weapons."

The Assembly of the Elders was, however, for negotiations. Undaunted, Gilgamesh took the matter to the younger people, the Assembly of the Fighting Men, who voted for war. The significance of the tale lies in its disclosure that a Sumerian ruler had to submit the question of war or peace to the First Bicameral Congress, some 5,000 years ago.

The title of First Historian was bestowed by Kramer on Entemena, king of Lagash, who recorded on clay cylinders his war with neighboring Umma. While other texts were literary works or epic poems whose themes were historical events, the inscriptions by Entemena were straight prose, written solely as a factual record of history.

Because the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia were deciphered well before the Sumerian records, it was long believed that the first code of laws was compiled and decreed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, circa 1900 B.C. But as Sumer's civilization was uncovered, it became clear that the "firsts" for a system of laws, for concepts of social order, and for the fair administration of justice belonged to Sumer.

Well before Hammurabi, a Sumerian ruler of the city-state of Eshnunna (northeast of Babylon) encoded laws that set maximum prices for foodstuffs and for the rental of wagons and boats so that the poor could not be oppressed. There were also laws dealing with offenses against person and property, and regulations pertaining to family matters and to master - servant relations.

Even earlier, a code was promulgated by Lipit-Ishtar, a ruler of Isin. The thirty-eight laws that remain legible on the partly preserved tablet (a copy of an original that was engraved on a stone stela) deal with real estate, slaves and servants, marriage and inheritance, the hiring of boats, the rental of oxen, and defaults on taxes.

As was done by Hammurabi after him, Lipit-Ishtar explained in the prologue to his code that he acted on the instructions of "the great gods," who had ordered him "to bring well-being to the Sumerians and the Akkadians."

Yet even Lipit-Ishtar was not the first Sumerian law encoder. Fragments of clay tablets that have been found contain copies of laws encoded by Urnammu, a ruler of Ur circa 2350 B.C. - more than half a millennium before Hammurabi.

The laws, enacted on the authority of the god Nannar, were aimed at stopping and punishing "the grabbers-of the citizens' oxen, sheep, and donkeys" so that "the orphan shall not fall prey to the wealthy, the widow shall not fall prey to the powerful, the man of one shekel shall not fall prey to a man of 60 shekels," Urnammu also decreed "honest and unchangeable weights and measurements."

But the Sumerian legal system, and the enforcement of justice, go back even farther in time.

By 2600 B.C. so much must already have happened in Sumer that the ensi Urukagina found it necessary to institute reforms. A long inscription by him has been called by scholars a precious record of man's first social reform based on a sense of freedom, equality, and justice - a "French Revolution" imposed by a king 4,400 years before July 14, 1789.

The reform decree of Urukagina listed the evils of his time first, then the reforms. The evils consisted primarily of the unfair use by supervisors of their powers to take the best for themselves; the abuse of official status; the extortion of high prices by monopolistic groups.

All such injustices, and many more, were prohibited by the reform decree. An official could no longer set his own price "for a good donkey or a house." A "big man" could no longer coerce a common citizen. The rights of the blind, poor, widowed, and orphaned were restated. A divorced woman - nearly 5,000 years ago - was granted the protection of the law.

How long had Sumerian civilization existed that it required a major reform? Clearly, a long time, for Urukagina claimed that it was his god Ningirsu who called upon him "to restore the decrees of former days." The clear implication is that a return to even older systems and earlier laws was called for.

The Sumerian laws were upheld by a court system in which the proceedings and judgments as well as contracts were meticulously recorded and preserved. The justices acted more like juries than judges; a court was usually made up of three or four judges, one of whom was a professional "royal judge" and the others drawn from a panel of thirty-six men.

While the Babylonians made rules and regulations, the Sumerians were concerned with justice, for they believed that the gods appointed the kings primarily to assure justice in the land.

More than one parallel can be drawn here with the concepts of justice and morality of the Old Testament. Even before the Hebrews had kings, they were governed by judges; kings were judged not by their conquests or wealth but by the extent to which they "did the righteous thing." In the Jewish religion, the New Year marks a ten-day period during which the deeds of men are weighed and evaluated to determine their fate in the coming year.

It is probably more than a coincidence that the Sumerians believed that a deity named Nanshe annually judged Mankind in the same manner; after all, the first Hebrew patriarch - Abraham - came from the Sumerian city of Ur, the city of Ur-Nammu and his code.

The Sumerian concern with justice or its absence also found expression in what Kramer called "the first 'Job.'" Matching together fragments of clay tablets at the Istanbul Museum of Antiquities, Kramer was able to read a good part of a Sumerian poem which, like the biblical Book of Job, dealt with the complaint of a righteous man who, instead of being blessed by the gods, was made to suffer all manner of loss and disrespect. "My righteous word has been turned into a lie," he cried out in anguish.

In its second part, the anonymous sufferer petitions his god in a manner akin to some verses in the Hebrew Psalms:

My god, you who are my father, who .begot me - -lift up my face.... How long will you neglect me, leave me unprotected... leave me without guidance?

Then follows a happy ending. "The righteous words, the pure words uttered by him, his god accepted; ... his god withdrew his hand from the evil pronouncement."

Preceding the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes by some two millennia, Sumerian proverbs conveyed many of the same concepts and witticisms.

If we are doomed to die - let us spend; If we shall live long - let us save.

When a poor man dies, do not try to revive him.

He who possesses much silver, may be happy; He who possesses much barley, may be happy; But who has nothing at all, can sleep!

Man: For his pleasure: Marriage; On his thinking it over: Divorce.

It is not the heart which leads to enmity; it is the tongue which leads to enmity.

In a city without watchdogs, the fox is the overseer.

The material and spiritual achievements of the Sumerian civilization were also accompanied by an extensive development of the performing arts.

A team of scholars from the University of California at Berkeley made news in March 1974 when they announced that they had deciphered the world's oldest song.

What professors Richard L. Crocker, Anne D. Kilmer, and Robert R. Brown achieved was to read and actually play the musical notes written on a cuneiform tablet from circa 1800 B.C., found at Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast (now in Syria).

"We always knew," the Berkeley team explained, "that (here was music in the earlier Assyrio-Babylonian civilization, but until this deciphering we did not know that it had the same heptatonic-diatonic scale that is characteristic of contemporary Western music, and of Greek music of the first millennium B.C."

Until now it was thought that Western music originated in Greece; now it has been established that our music - as so much else of Western civilization - originated in Mesopotamia.

This should not be surprising, for the Greek scholar Philo had already stilted that the Mesopotamians were known to "seek worldwide harmony and unison through the musical tones."

There can be no doubt that music and song must also be claimed as a Sumerian "first." Indeed, Professor Crocker could play the ancient tune only by constructing a lyre like those which had been found in the ruins of Ur.

Texts from the second millennium B.C. indicate the existence of musical "key numbers" and a coherent musical theory; and Professor Kilmer herself wrote earlier (The Strings of Musical Instruments: Their Names, Numbers and Significance) that many Sumerian hymnal texts had "what appear to be musical notations in the margins." "The Sumerians and their successors had a full musical life," she concluded.

No wonder, then, that we find a great variety of musical instruments - as well as of singers and dancers performing - depicted on cylinder seals and clay tablets.

Like so many other Sumerian achievements, music and song also originated in the temples. But, beginning in the service of the gods, these performing arts soon were also prevalent outside the temples.

Employing the favorite Sumerian play on words, a popular saying commented on the fees charged by singers:

"A singer whose voice is not sweet is a 'poor' singer indeed."

Many Sumerian love songs have been found; they were undoubtedly sung to musical accompaniment. Most touching, however, is a lullaby that a mother composed and sang to her sick child:

Come sleep, come sleep, come to my son.

Hurry sleep to my son;

Put to sleep his restless eyes. ...

You are in pain, my son;

I am troubled, I am struck dumb,

I gaze up to the stars.

The new moon shines down on your face;

Your shadow will shed tears for you.

Lie, lie in your sleep....

May the goddess of growth be your ally;

May you have an eloquent guardian in heaven;

May you achieve a reign of happy days....

May a wife be your support;

May a son be your future lot.

What is striking about such music and songs is not only the conclusion that Sumer was the source of Western music in structure and harmonic composition.

No less significant is the fact that as we hear the music and read the poems, they do not sound strange or alien at all, even in their depth of feeling and their sentiments. Indeed, as we contemplate the great Sumerian civilization, we find that not only are our morals and our sense of justice, our laws and architecture and arts and technology rooted in Sumer, but the Sumerian institutions are so familiar, so close. At heart, it would seem, we are all Sumerians.

After excavating at Lagash, the archaeologist's spade uncovered Nipper, the onetime religious center of Sumer and Akkad. Of the 30,000 texts found there, many remain unstudied to this day.

At Shuruppak, schoolhouses dating to the third millennium B.C. were found. At Ur, scholars found magnificent vases, jewelry, weapons, chariots, helmets made of gold, silver, copper, and bronze, the remains of a weaving factory, court records - and a towering ziggurat whose ruins still dominate the landscape.

At Eshnunna and Adab the archaeologists found temples and artful statues from pre-Sargonic times. Umma produced inscriptions speaking of early empires. At Kish monumental buildings and a ziggurat from at least 3000 B.C. were unearthed.

Uruk (Erech) took the archaeologists back into the fourth millennium B.C. There they found the first colored pottery baked in a kiln, and evidence of the first use of a potter's wheel. A pavement of limestone blocks is the oldest stone construction found to date. At Uruk the archaeologists also found the first ziggurat - a vast man-made mound, on top of which stood a white temple and a red temple. The world's first inscribed texts were also found there, as well as the first cylinder seals.

Of the latter, Jack Finegan (Light from the Ancient Past) said,

"The excellence of the seals upon their first appearance in the Uruk period is amazing."

Other sites of the Uruk period bear evidence of the emergence of the Metal Age.

In 1919, H. R. Hall came upon ancient ruins at a village now called El-Ubaid.

The site gave its name to what scholars now consider the first phase of the great Sumerian civilization. Sumerian cities of that period - ranging from northern Mesopotamia to the southern Zagros foothills - produced the first use of clay bricks, plastered walls, mosaic decorations, cemeteries with brick-lined graves, painted and decorated ceramic wares with geometric designs, copper mirrors, beads of imported turquoise, paint for eyelids, copper-headed "tomahawks," cloth, houses, and, above all, monumental temple buildings.

Farther south, the archaeologists found Eridu - the first Sumerian city, according to ancient texts. As the excavators dug deeper, they came upon a temple dedicated to Enki, Sumer's God of Knowledge, which appeared to have been built and rebuilt many times over.

The strata clearly led the scholars back to the beginnings of Sumerian civilization: 2500 B.C., 2800 B.C., 3000 B.C., 3500 B.C.

Then the spades came upon the foundations of the first temple dedicated to Enki.

Below that, there was virgin soil - nothing had been built before. The time was circa 3800 B.C. That is when civilization began.

It was not only the first civilization in the true sense of the term. It was a most extensive civilization, all-encompassing, in many ways more advanced than the other ancient cultures that had followed it. It was undoubtedly the civilization on which our own is based.

Having begun to use stones as tools some 2,000,000 years earlier, Man achieved this unprecedented civilization in Sumer circa 3800 B.C. And the perplexing fact about this is that to this very day the scholars have no inkling who the Sumerians were, where they came from, and how and why their civilization appeared.

For its appearance was sudden, unexpected, and out of nowhere.

H. Frankfort (Tell Uqair) called it "astonishing." Pierre Amiet (Elam) termed it "extraordinary." A. Parrot (Sumer) described it as "a flame which blazed up so suddenly." Leo Oppenheim (Ancient Mesopotamia) stressed "the astonishingly short period" within which this civilization had arisen.

Joseph Campbell (The Masks of God) summed it up in this way:

"With stunning abruptness... there appears in this little Sumerian mud garden... the whole cultural syndrome that has since constituted the germinal unit of all the high civilizations of the world."

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GODS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

WHAT WAS IT that after hundreds of thousands and even millions of years of painfully slow human development abruptly changed everything so completely, and in a one - two-three punch - circa 11,000-7400-3800 B.C. - transformed primitive nomadic hunters and food gatherers into farmers and pottery makers, and then into builders of cities, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, metallurgists, merchants, musicians, judges, doctors, authors, librarians, priests?

One can go further and ask an even more basic question, so well stated by Professor Robert J. Braid-wood (Prehistoric Men):

"Why did it happen at all? Why are all human beings not still living as the Maglemosians did?"

The Sumerians, the people through whom this high civilization so suddenly came into being, had a ready answer. It was summed up by one of the tens of thousands of ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that have been uncovered: "Whatever seems beautiful, we made by the grace of the gods."

The gods of Sumer. Who were they?

Were the gods of the Sumerians like the Greek gods, who were described as living at a great court, feasting in the Great Hall of Zeus in the heavens - Olympus, whose counterpart on earth was Greece's highest peak, Mount Olympus?

The Greeks described their gods as anthropomorphic, as physically similar to mortal men and women, and human in character: They could be happy and angry and jealous; they made love, quarreled, fought; and they procreated like humans, bringing forth offspring through sexual intercourse - with each other or with humans.

They were unreachable, and yet they were constantly mixed up in human affairs. They could travel at immense speeds, appear and disappear; they had weapons of immense and unusual power. Each had specific functions, and, as a result, a specific human activity could suffer or benefit by the attitude of the god in charge of that particular activity; therefore, rituals of worship, and offerings to the gods were supposed to gain their favor.

The principal deity of the Greeks during their Hellenic civilization was Zeus, "Father of Gods and Men," "Master of the Celestial Fire." His chief weapon and symbol was the thunderbolt. He was a "king" upon earth who had descended from the heavens; a decision maker and the dispenser of good and evil to mortals, yet one whose original domain was in the skies.

He was neither the first god upon Earth nor the first deity to have been in the heavens. Mixing theology with cosmology to come up with what scholars treat as mythology, the Greeks believed that first there was Chaos; then Gaea (Earth) and her consort Uranus (the heavens) appeared. Gaea and Uranus brought forth the twelve Titans, six males and six females. Though their legendary deeds look place on Earth, it is assumed that they had astral counterparts.

Cronus, the youngest male Titan, emerged as the principal figure in Olympian mythology. He rose to supremacy among the Titans through usurpation, after castrating his father Uranus. Fearful of the other Titans, Cronus imprisoned and banished them. For that, he was cursed by his mother: He would suffer the same fate as his father, and be dethroned by one of his own sons.

Cronus consorted with his own sister Rhea, who bore him three sons and three daughters; Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus; Hestia, Demeter, and Hera. Once again, it was fated that the youngest son would be the one to depose his hither, and the curse of Gaea came true when Zeus over-threw Cronus, his father.

The overthrow, it would seem, did not go smoothly. For many years battles between the gods and a host of monstrous beings ensued. The decisive battle was between Zeus and Typhon, a serpent-like deity. The fighting ranged over wide areas, on Earth and in the skies.

The final battle took place at Mount Casius, near the boundary between Egypt and Arabia - apparently somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula.

Having won the struggle, Zeus was recognized as the supreme deity.

Nevertheless, he had to share control with his brothers. By choice (or, according to one version, through the throwing of lots), Zeus was given control of the skies, the eldest brother Hades was accorded the Lower World, and the middle brother Poseidon was given mastery of the seas.

Though in time Hades and his region became a synonym for Hell, his original domain was a territory somewhere "far below," encompassing marshlands, desolate areas, and lands watered by mighty rivers. Hades was depicted as "the unseen" - aloof, forbidding, stern; unmoved by prayer or sacrifice. Poseidon, on the other hand, was frequently seen holding up his symbol (the trident).

Though ruler of the seas, he was also master of the arts of metallurgy and sculpting, as well as a crafty magician or conjurer. While Zeus was depicted in Greek tradition and legend as strict with Mankind - even as one who at one point schemed to annihilate Mankind - Poseidon was considered a friend of Mankind and a god who went to great lengths to gain the praise of mortals.

The three brothers and their three sisters, all children of Cronus by his sister Rhea, made up the older part of the Olympian Circle, the group of Twelve Great Gods. The other six were all offspring of Zeus, and the Greek tales dealt mostly with their genealogies and relationships.

The male and female deities fathered by Zeus were mothered by different goddesses. Consorting at first with a goddess named Metis, Zeus had born to him a daughter, the great goddess Athena. She was in charge of common sense and handiwork, and was thus the Goddess of Wisdom. But as the only major deity to have stayed with Zeus during his combat with Typhon (all the other gods had fled), Athena acquired martial qualities and was also the Goddess of War.

She was the "perfect maiden" and became no one's wife; but some tales link her frequently with her uncle Poseidon, and though his official consort was the goddess who was the Lady of the Labyrinth from the island of Crete, his niece Athena was his mistress.

Zeus then consorted with other goddesses, but their children did not qualify for the Olympian Circle. When Zeus got around to the serious business of producing a male heir, he turned to one of his own sisters. The eldest was Hestia. She was, by all accounts, a recluse - perhaps too old or too sick to be the object of matrimonial activities - mid Zeus needed little excuse to turn his attentions to Demeter, the middle sister, the Goddess of Fruitfulness.

Hut, instead of a son, she bore him a daughter, Persephone, who became wife to her uncle Hades and shared his dominion over the Lower World.

Disappointed that no son was born, Zeus turned to other goddesses for comfort and love. Of Harmonia he had nine daughters. Then Leto bore him a daughter and a son, Artemis and Apollo, who were at once drawn into the group of major deities.

Apollo, as firstborn son of Zeus, was one of the greatest gods of the Hellenic pantheon, feared by men and gods alike. He was the interpreter to mortals of the will of his father Zeus, and thus the authority in matters of religious law and temple worship. Representing moral and divine laws, he stood for purification and perfection, both spiritual and physical.

Zeus's second son, born of the goddess Maia, was Hermes, patron of shepherds, guardian of the flocks and herds. Less important and powerful than his brother Apollo, he was closer to human affairs; any stroke of good luck was attributed to him. As Giver of Good Things, he was the deity in charge of commerce, patron of merchants and travelers. But his main role in myth and epic was as herald of Zeus, Messenger of the Gods.

Impelled by certain dynastic traditions, Zeus still required a son by one of his sisters - and he turned to the youngest, Hera. Marrying her in the rites of a Sacred Marriage, Zeus proclaimed her Queen of the Gods, the Mother Goddess. Their marriage was blessed by a son, Ares, and two daughters, but rocked by constant infidelities on the part of Zeus, as well as a rumored infidelity on the part of Hera, which cast doubt on the true parentage of another son, Hephaestus.

Ares was at once incorporated into the Olympian Circle of twelve major gods and was made Zeus's chief lieutenant, a God of War. He was depicted as the Spirit of Carnage; yet he was far from being invincible - fighting at the battle of Troy, on the side of the Trojans, he suffered a wound which only Zeus could heal.

Hephaestus, on the other hand, had to fight his way into the Olympian summit. He was a God of Creativity; to him was attributed the fire of the forge and the art of metallurgy. He was a divine artificer, maker of both practical and magical objects for men and gods. The legends say that he was born lame and was therefore cast away in anger by his mother Hera.

Another and more believable version has it that it was Zeus who banished Hephaestus - because of the doubt regarding his parentage - but Hephaestus used his magically creative powers to force Zeus to give him a seat among the Great Gods.

The legends also relate that Hephaestus once made an invisible net that would close over his wife's bed if it were warmed by an intruding lover. He may have needed such protection, for his wife and consort was Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty. It was only natural that many tales of love affairs would build up around her; in many of these the seducer was Ares, brother of Hephaestus. (One of the offspring of that illicit love affair was Eros, the God of Love.)

Aphrodite was included in the Olympian Circle of Twelve, and the circumstances of her inclusion shed light on our subject.

She was neither a sister of Zeus nor his daughter, yet she could not be ignored. She had come from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean facing Greece (according to the Greek poet Hesiod, she arrived by way of Cyprus); and, claiming great antiquity, she ascribed her origin to the genitals of Uranus.

She was thus genealogically one generation ahead of Zeus, being (so to say) a sister of his father, and the embodiment of the castrated Forefather of the Gods.

Aphrodite, then, had to be included among the Olympian gods.

But their total number, twelve, apparently could not be exceeded. The solution was ingenious: Add one by dropping one. Since Hades was given domain over the Lower World and did not remain among the Great Gods on Mount Olympus, a vacancy was created, admirably handy for seating Aphrodite in the exclusive Circle of Twelve.

It also appears that the number twelve was a requirement that worked both ways: There could be no more than twelve Olympians, but no fewer than twelve, either. This becomes evident through the circumstances that led to the inclusion of Dionysus in the Olympian Circle. He was a son of Zeus, born when Zeus impregnated his own daughter, Semele.

Dionysus, who had to be hidden from Hera's wrath, was sent to far-off lands (reaching even India), introducing vinegrowing and winemaking wherever he went. In the meantime, a vacancy became available on Olympus. Hestia, the oldest sister of Zeus, weaker and older, was dropped entirely from the Circle of Twelve. Dionysus then returned to Greece and was allowed to fill the vacancy. Once again, there were twelve Olympians.

Though Greek mythology was not clear regarding the origins of mankind, the legends and traditions claimed descent from the gods for heroes and kings. These semi-gods formed the link between the human destiny - daily toil, dependence on the elements, plagues, illness, death - and a golden past, when only the gods roamed Earth. And although so many of the gods were born on Earth, the select Circle of Twelve Olympians represented the celestial aspect of the gods.

The original Olympus was described by the Odyssey as lying in the "pure upper air." The original Twelve Great Gods were Gods of Heaven who had come down to Eearth; and they represented the twelve celestial bodies in the "vault of Heaven."

The Latin names of the Great Gods, given them when the Romans adopted the Greek pantheon, clarify their astral associations: Gaea was Earth; Hermes, Mercury; Aphrodite, Venus; Ares, Mars; Cronus, Saturn; and Zeus, Jupiter.

Continuing the Greek tradition, the Romans envisaged Jupiter as a thundering god whose weapon was the lightning bolt; like the Greeks, the Romans associated him with the bull.

There is now general agreement that the foundations of the distinct Greek civilization were laid on the island of Crete, where the Minoan culture flourished from circa 2700 B.C. to 1400 B.C.

In Minoan myth and legend, the tale of the minotaur is prominent. This half-man, half-bull was the offspring of Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos, and a bull. Archaeological finds have confirmed the extensive Minoan worship of the bull, and some cylinder seals depict the bull as a divine being accompanied by a cross symbol, which stood for some unidentified star or planet.

It has therefore been surmised that the bull worshiped by the Minoans was not the common earthly creature but the Celestial Bull - the constellation Taurus - in commemoration of some events that had occurred when the Sun's spring equinox appeared in that constellation, circa 4000 B.C.

By Greek tradition, Zeus arrived on the Greek mainland via Crete, whence he had fled (by swimming the Mediterranean) after abducting Europa, the beautiful daughter of the king of the Phoenician city of Tyre. Indeed, when the earliest Minoan script was finally deciphered by Cyrus H. Gordon, it was shown to be "a Semitic dialect from the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean."

Gods came directly to Greece from the heavens. Zeus arrived from across the Mediterranean, via Crete. Aphrodite was said to have come by sea from the Near East, via Cyprus. Poseidon (Neptune to the Romans) brought the horse with him from Asia Minor. Athena brought "the olive, fertile and self-sown," to Greece from the lands of the Bible.

There is no doubt that the Greek traditions and religion arrived on the Greek mainland from the Near East, via Asia Minor and the Mediterranean islands. It is there that their pantheon had its roots; it is there that we should look for the origins of the Greek gods, and their astral relationship with the number twelve.

Hinduism, the ancient religion of India, considers the Vedas - compositions of hymns, sacrificial formulas, and other sayings pertaining to the gods - as sacred scriptures, "not of human origin:" The gods themselves composed them, the Hindu traditions say, in the age that preceded the present one.

But, as time went on, more and more of the original 100,000 verses, passed from generation to generation orally, were lost and confused. In the end, a sage wrote down the remaining verses, dividing them into four books and trusting four of his principal disciples to preserve one Veda each.

When, in the nineteenth century, scholars began to decipher and understand forgotten languages and trace the connections between them, they realized that the Vedas were written in a very ancient Indo-European language, the predecessor of the Indian root-tongue Sanskrit, of Greek, Latin, and other European languages. When they were finally able to read and analyze the Vedas, they were surprised to see the uncanny similarity between the Vedic tales of the gods and the Greek ones.

The gods, the Vedas told, were all members of one large, but not necessarily peaceful, family. Amid the tales of ascents to the heavens and descents to Earth, aerial battles, wondrous weapons, friendships and rivalries, marriages and infidelities, there appears to have existed a basic concern for genealogical record keeping - who fathered whom, and who was the firstborn of whom.

The gods on Earth originated in the heavens; and the principal deities, even on Earth, continued to represent celestial bodies.

In primeval times, the Rishis ("primeval flowing ones") "flowed" celestially, possessed of irresistible powers. Of them, seven were the Great Progenitors. The gods Rahu ("demon") and Ketu ("disconnected") were once a single celestial body that sought to join the gods without permission; but the God of Storms hurled his flaming weapon at him, cutting him into two parts - Rahu, the "Dragon's Head," which unceasingly traverses the heavens in search of vengeance, and Ketu, the "Dragon's Tail."

Mar-Ishi, the progenitor of the Solar Dynasty, gave birth to Kash-Yapa ("he who is the throne"). The Vedas describe him as having been quite prolific; but the dynastic succession was continued only through his ten children by Prit-Hivi ("heavenly mother").

As dynastic head, Kash-Yapa was also chief of the devas ("shining ones") and bore the title Dyaus-Pitar ("shining father"). Together with his consort and ten children, the divine family made up the twelve Adityas, gods who were each assigned a sign of the zodiac and a celestial body. Kash-Yapa's celestial body was "the shining star"; Prit-Hivi represented Earth.

Then there were the gods whose celestial counterparts included the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.

In time, the leadership of the pantheon of twelve passed lo Varuna, the God of the Heavenly Expanse. He was omnipresent and all-seeing; one of the hymns to him reads almost like a biblical psalm:

It is he who makes the sun shine in the heavens,

And the winds that blow are his breath.

He has hollowed out the channels of the rivers;

They flow at his command.

He has made the depths of the sea.

His reign also came sooner or later to an end.

Indra, the god who slew the celestial "Dragon," claimed the throne by slaying his father. He was the new Lord of the Skies and God of Storms. Lightning and thunder were his weapons, and his epithet was Lord of Hosts. He had, however, to share dominion with his two brothers. One was Vivashvat, who was the progenitor of Manu, the first Man.

The other was Agni ("igniter"), who brought fire down to Earth from the heavens, so that Mankind could use it industrially.

The similarities between the Vedic and Greek pantheons are obvious. The tales concerning the principal deities, as well as the verses dealing with a multitude of other lesser deities - sons, wives, daughters, mistresses - are clearly duplicates (or originals?) of the Greek tales.

There is no doubt that Dyaus came to mean Zeus; Dyaus-Pitar, Jupiter; Varuna, Uranus; and so on. And, in both instances, the Circle of the Great Gods always stood at twelve, no matter what changes took place in the divine succession.

How could such similarity arise in two areas so far apart, geographically and in time?

Scholars believe that sometime in the second millennium B.C. a people speaking an Indo-European language, and centered in northern Iran or the Caucasus area, embarked on great migrations. One group went southeast, to India. The Hindus called them Aryans ("noble men"). They brought with them the Vedas as oral tales, circa 1500 B.C.

Another wave of this Indo-European migration went westward, to Europe. Some circled the Black Sea and arrived in Europe via the steppes of Russia. But the main route by which these people and their traditions and religion reached Greece was the shortest one: Asia Minor. Some of the most ancient Greek cities, in fact, lie not on the Greek mainland but at the western tip of Asia Minor.

But who were these Indo-Europeans who chose Anatolia as their abode? Little in Western knowledge shed light on the subject.

Once again, the only readily available - and reliable - source proved to be the Old Testament. There the scholars found several references to the "Hittites" as the people inhabiting the mountains of Anatolia. Unlike the enmity reflected in the Old Testament toward the Canaanites and other neighbors whose customs were considered an "abomination," the Hittites were regarded as friends and allies to Israel.

Bathsheba, whom King David coveted, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, an officer in King David's army. King Solomon, who forged alliances by marrying the daughters of foreign kings, took as wives the daughters both of an Egyptian pharaoh and of a Hittite king.

At another time, an invading Syrian army fled upon hearing a rumor that,

"the king of Israel hath hired against us the kings of the Hittites and the kings of the Egyptians."

These brief allusions to the Hittites reveal the high esteem in which their military abilities were held by other peoples of the ancient Near East.

With the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs - and, later on, of the Mesopotamian inscriptions - scholars have come across numerous references to a "Land of Hatti" as a large and powerful kingdom in Anatolia. Could such an important power have left no trace?

Forearmed with the clues provided in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts, the scholars embarked on excavations of ancient sites in Anatolia's hilly regions. The efforts paid off: They found Hittite cities, palaces, royal treasures, royal tombs, temples, religious objects, tools, weapons, art objects. Above all, they found many inscriptions - both in a pictographic script and in cuneiform. The biblical Hittites had come to life.

A unique monument bequeathed to us by the ancient Near East is a rock carving outside the ancient Hittite capital (the site is nowadays called Yazilikaya, which in Turkish means "inscribed rock").

After passing through gateways and sanctuaries, the ancient worshiper came into an open-air gallery, an opening among a semicircle of rocks, on which all the gods of the Hittites were depicted in procession.

Marching in from the left is a long procession of primarily male deities, clearly organized in "companies" of twelve. At the extreme left, and thus last to march in this amazing parade, are twelve deities who look identical, all carrying the same weapon.

The middle group of twelve marchers includes some deities who look older, some who bear diversified weapons, and two who are highlighted by a divine symbol.

The third (front) group of twelve is clearly made up of the more important male and female deities.

Their weapons and emblems are more varied; four have the divine celestial symbol above them; two are winged. This group also includes non-divine participants: two bulls holding up a globe, and the king of the Hittites, wearing a skull cap and standing under the emblem of the Winged Disk.

Marching in from the right were two groups of female deities; the rock carvings are, however, too mutilated to ascertain their full original number. We will probably not be wrong in assuming that they, too, made up two "companies" of twelve each.

The two processions from the left and from the right met at a central panel which clearly depicted Great Gods, for they were all shown elevated, standing atop mountains, animals, birds, or even on the shoulders of divine attendants.

Much effort was invested by scholars (for example, E. Laroche, Le Pantheon de Yazilikaya) to determine from the depictions, the hieroglyphic symbols, as well as from partly legible texts and god names that were actually carved on the rocks, the names, titles, and roles of the deities included in the procession.

But it is clear that the Hittite pantheon, too, was governed by the "Olympian" twelve. The lesser gods were organized in groups of twelve, and the Great Gods on Earth were associated with twelve celestial bodies.

That the pantheon was governed by the "sacred number" twelve is made additionally certain by yet another Hittite monument, a masonry shrine found near the present-day Beit-Zehir.

It clearly depicts the divine couple, surrounded by ten other gods - making a total of twelve.

The archaeological finds showed conclusively that the Hittites worshiped gods that were "of Heaven and Earth," all interrelated and arranged into a genealogical hierarchy.

Some were great and "olden" gods who were originally of the heavens. Their symbol - which in the Hittite pictographic writing meant "divine" or "heavenly god" - looked like a pair of eye goggles.

It frequently appeared on round seals as part of a rocket-like object.

Other gods were actually present, not merely on Earth but among the Hittites, acting as supreme rulers of the land, appointing the human kings, and instructing the latter in matters of war, treaties, and other international affairs.

Heading the physically present Hittite gods was a deity named Teshub, which meant "wind blower." He was thus what scholars call a Storm God, associated with winds, thunder, and lightning. He was also nicknamed Taru ("bull").

Like the Greeks, the Hittites depicted bull worship; like Jupiter after him, Teshub was depicted as the God of Thunder and Lightning, mounted upon a bull.

Hittite texts, like later Greek legends, relate how then-chief deity had to battle a monster to consolidate his supremacy.

A text named by the scholars "The Myth of the Slaying of the Dragon" identifies Teshub's adversary as the god Yanka. Failing to defeat him in battle, Teshub appealed to the other gods for help, but only one goddess came to his assistance, and disposed of Yanka by getting him drunk at a party.

Recognizing in such tales the origins of the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, scholars refer to the adversary smitten by the "good" god as "the dragon."

But the fact is that Yanka meant "serpent," and that the ancient peoples depicted the "evil" god as such - as seen in this bas-relief from a Hittite site.

Zeus, too, as we have shown, battled not a "dragon" but a serpent-god.

As we shall show later on, there was deep meaning attached to these ancient traditions of a struggle between a god of winds and a serpent deity. Here, however, we can only stress that battles among the gods for the divine Kingship were reported in the ancient texts as events that had unquestionably taken place.

A long and well-preserved Hittite epic tale, entitled "Kingship in Heaven," deals with this very subject - the heavenly origin of the gods.

The recounter of those pre-mortal events first called upon twelve "mighty olden gods" to listen to his tale, and be witnesses to its accuracy:

Let there listen the gods who are in Heaven,

And those who are upon the dark-hued Earth!

Let there listen, the mighty olden gods.

Thus establishing that the gods of old were both of Heaven and upon Earth, the epic lists the twelve "mighty olden ones," the forebears of the gods; and assuring their attention, the recounter proceeded to tell how the god who was "king in Heaven" came to "dark-hued Earth":

Formerly, in the olden days, Alalu was king in Heaven;

He, Alalu, was seated on the throne.

Mighty Anu, the first among the gods, stood before him,

Bowed at his feet, set the drinking cup in his hand.

For nine counted periods, Alalu was king in Heaven.

In the ninth period, Anu gave battle against Alalu.

Alalu was defeated, he fled before Anu -

He descended to the dark-hued Earth.

Down to the dark-hued Earth he went;

On the throne sat Anu.

The epic thus attributed the arrival of a "king in Heaven" upon Earth to a usurpation of the throne: A god named Alalu was forcefully deposed from his throne (somewhere in the heavens), and, fleeing for his life, "descended to dark-hued Earth." But that was not the end.

The text proceeded to recount how Anu, in turn, was also deposed by a god named Kumarbi (Anu's own brother, by some interpretations).

There is no doubt that this epic, written a thousand years before the Greek legends were composed, was the forerunner of the tale of the deposing of Uranus by Cronus and of Cronus by Zeus. Even the detail pertaining to the castration of Cronus by Zeus is found in the Hittite text, for that was exactly what Kumarbi did to Anu:

For nine counted periods Anu was king in Heaven;

In the ninth period, Anu had to do battle with Kumarbi.

Anu slipped out of Kumarbi's hold and fled -

Flee did Anu, rising up to the sky.

After him Kumarbi rushed, seized him by his feet;

He pulled him down from the skies.

He bit his loins; and the "Manhood" of Anu

with the insides of Kumarbi combined, fused as bronze.

According to this ancient tale, the battle did not result in a total victory.

Though emasculated, Anu managed to fly back to his Heavenly Abode, leaving Kumarbi in control of Earth. Meanwhile, Anu's "Manhood" produced several deities within Kumarbi's insides, which he (like Cronus in the Greek legends) was forced to release. One of these was Teshub, the chief Hittite deity.

However, there was to be one more epic battle before Teshub could rule in peace.

Learning of the appearance of an heir to Anu in Kummiya ("heavenly abode"), Kumarbi devised a plan to "raise a rival to the God of Storms." "Into his hand he took his staff; upon his feet he put the shoes that are swift as winds"; and he went from his city Ur-Kish to the abode of the Lady of the Great Mountain.

Reaching her,

His desire was aroused; He slept with Lady Mountain; His manhood flowed into her. Five times he took her... Ten times he took her.

Was Kumarbi simply lustful? We have reason to believe that much more was involved.

Our guess would be that the succession rules of the gods were such that a son of Kumarbi by the Lady of the Great Mountain could have claimed to be the rightful heir to the Heavenly Throne; and that Kumarbi "took" the goddess five and ten times in order to make sure that she conceived, as indeed she did: she bore a son, whom Kumarbi symbolically named Ulli-Kummi ("suppressor of Kummiya" - Teshub's abode).

The battle for succession was foreseen by Kumarbi as one that would entail fighting in the heavens.

Having destined his son to suppress the incumbents at Kummiya, Kumarbi further proclaimed for his son:

Let him ascend to Heaven for kingship!

Let him vanquish Kummiya, the beautiful city!

Let him attack the God of Storms

And tear him to pieces, like a mortal!

Let him shoot down all the gods from the sky.

Did the particular battles fought by Teshub upon Earth and in the skies take place when the Age of Taurus commenced, circa 4000 B.C.? Was it for that reason that the winner was granted association with the bull? And were the events in any way connected with the beginning, at the very same time, of the sudden civilization of Sumer?

There can be no doubt that the Hittite pantheon and tales of the gods indeed had their roots in Sumer, its civilization, and its gods.

The tale of the challenge to the Divine Throne by Ulli-Kummi continues to relate heroic battles but of an indecisive nature. At one point, the failure of Teshub to defeat his adversary even caused his spouse, Hebat, to attempt suicide. Finally, an appeal was made to the gods to mediate the dispute, and an Assembly of the Gods was called.

It was led by an "olden god" named Enlil, and another "olden god" named Ea, who was called upon to produce "the old tablets with the words of destiny" - some ancient records that could apparently help settle the dispute regarding the divine succession.

When these records failed to settle the dispute, Enlil advised another battle with the challenger, but with the help of some very ancient weapons.

"Listen, ye olden gods, ye who know the olden words," Enlil said to his followers:

Open ye the ancient storehouses

Of the fathers and the forefathers!

Bring forth the Olden Copper lance

With which Heaven was separated from Earth;

And let them sever the feet of Ulli-kummi.

Who were these "olden gods"? The answer is obvious, for all of them - Anu, Antu, Enlil, Ninlil, Ea, Ishkur - bear Sumerian names. Even the name of Teshub, as well as the names of other "Hittite" gods, were often written in Sumerian script to denote their identities. Also, some of the places named in the action were those of ancient Sumerian sites.

It dawned on the scholars that the Hittites in fact worshipped a pantheon of Sumerian origins, and that the arena of the tales of the "olden gods" was Sumer.

This, however, was only part of a much wider discovery. Not only was the Hittite language found to be based on several Indo-European dialects, but it was also found to be subject to substantial Akkadian influence, both in speech and more so in writing. Since Akkadian was the international language of the ancient world in the second millennium B.C., its influence on Hittite could somehow be rationalized.

But there was cause for true astonishment when scholars discovered in the course of deciphering Hittite that it extensively employed Sumerian pictographic signs, syllables, and even whole words! Moreover, it became obvious that Sumerian was their language of high learning.

The Sumerian language, in the words of O. R. Gurney (The Hittites),

"was intensively studied at Hattu-Shash [the capital city] and Sumerian-Hittite vocabularies were found there... Many of the syllables associated with the cuneiform signs in the Hittite period are really Sumerian words of which the meaning had been forgotten [by the Hittites]... In the Hittite texts the scribes often replaced common Hittite words by the corresponding Sumerian or Babylonian word."

Now, when the Hittites reached Babylon sometime after 1600 B.C., the Sumerians were already long gone from the Near Eastern scene. How was it, then, that their language, literature, and religion dominated another great kingdom in another millennium and in another part of Asia?

The bridge, scholars have recently discovered, were a people called the Hurrians.

Referred to in the Old Testament as the Horites ("free people"), they dominated the wide area between Sumer and Akkad in Mesopotamia and the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia. In the north their lands were the ancient "cedar lands" from which countries near and far obtained their best woods.

In the east their centers embraced the present-day oil fields of Iraq; in one city alone, Nuzi, archaeologists found not only the usual structures and artifacts but also thousands of legal and social documents of great value. In the west, the Hurrians' rule and influence extended to the Mediterranean coast and encompassed such great ancient centers of trade, industry, and learning as Carchemish and Alalakh.

But the seats of their power, the main centers of the ancient trade routes, and the sites of the most venerated shrines were within the heartland that was "between the two rivers," the biblical Naharayim. Their most ancient capital (as yet undiscovered) was located somewhere on the Khabur River.

Their greatest trading center, on the Balikh River, was the biblical Haran - the city where the family of the patriarch Abraham sojourned on their way from Ur in southern Mesopotamia to the Land of Canaan.

Egyptian and Mesopotamian royal documents referred to the Human kingdom as Mitanni, and dealt with it on an equal footing - a strong power whose influence spread beyond its immediate borders. The Hittites called their Human neighbors "Hurri."

Some scholars pointed out, however, that the word could also be read "Har," and (like G. Contenau in La Civilisation des Hittites et des Hurrites du Mitanni) have raised the possibility that, in the name "Harri,"

"one sees the name 'Ary' or Aryans for these people."

There is no doubt that the Hurrians were Aryan or Indo-European in origin.

Their inscriptions invoked several deities by their Vedic "Aryan" names, their kings bore Indo-European names, and their military and cavalry terminology derived from the Indo-European. B. Hrozny, who in the 1920s led an effort to unravel the Hittite and Human records, even went so far as to call the Hurrians "the oldest Hindus."

These Hurrians dominated the Hittites culturally and religiously. The Hittite mythological texts were found to be of Hurrian provenance, and even epic tales of prehistoric, semi-divine heroes were of Hurrian origin. There is no longer any doubt that the Hittites acquired their cosmology, their "myths," their gods, and their pantheon of twelve from the Hurrians.

The triple connection - between Aryan origins, Hittite worship, and the Hurrian sources of these beliefs - is remarkably well documented in a Hittite prayer by a woman for the life of her sick husband.

Addressing her prayer to the goddess Hebat, Teshub's spouse, the woman intoned:

Oh goddess of the Rising Disc of Arynna,

My Lady, Mistress of the Hatti Lands,

Queen of Heaven and Earth. . . .

In the Hatti country, thy name is

"Goddess of the Rising Disc of Arynna";

But in the land that thou madest,

In the Cedar Land,

Thou bearest the name "Hebat."

With all that, the culture and religion adopted and transmitted by the Hurrians were not Indo-European. Even their language was not really Indo-European.

There were undoubtedly Akkadian elements in the Hurrian language, culture, and traditions. The name of their capital, Washugeni, was a variant of the Semitic resh-eni ("where the waters begin"). The Tigris River was called Aranzakh, which (we believe) stemmed from the Akkadian words for "river of the pure cedars." The gods Shamash and Tash-metum became the Hurrian Shimiki and Tashimmetish - and so on.

But since the Akkadian culture and religion were only a development of the original Sumerian traditions and beliefs, the Hurrians, in fact, absorbed and transmitted the religion of Sumer. That this was so was also evident from the frequent use of the original Sumerian divine names, epithets, and writing signs.

The epic tales, it has become clear, were the tales of Sumer; the "dwelling places" of the olden gods were Sumerian cities; the "olden language" was the language of Sumer. Even the Hurrian art duplicated Sumerian art - its form, its themes, and its symbols.

When and how were the Hurrians "mutated" by the Sumerian "gene"?

Evidence suggests that the Hurrians, who were the northern neighbors of Sumer and Akkad in the second millennium B.C., had actually commingled with the Sumerians in the previous millennium. It is an established fact that Hurrians were present and active in Sumer in the third millennium B.C., that they held important positions in Sumer during its last period of glory, that of the third dynasty of Ur.

There is evidence showing that the Hurrians managed and manned the garment industry for which Sumer (and especially Ur) was known in antiquity. The renowned merchants of Ur were probably Hurrians for the most part.

In the thirteenth century B.C., under the pressure of vast migrations and invasions (including the Israelite thrust from Egypt to Canaan), the Hurrians retreated to the northeastern portion of their kingdom. Establishing their new capital near Lake Van, they called their kingdom Urartu ("Ararat"). There they worshiped a pantheon headed by Tesheba (Teshub), depicting him as a vigorous god wearing a horned cap and standing upon his cult symbol, the bull.

They called their main shrine Bitanu ("house of Anu") and dedicated themselves to making their kingdom "the fortress of the valley of Anu."

And Anu, as we shall see, was the Sumerian Father of the Gods.

What about the other avenue by which the tales and worship of the gods reached Greece - from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, via Crete and Cyprus?

The lands that are today Israel, Lebanon, and southern Syria - which formed the southwestern band of the ancient Fertile Crescent - were then the habitat of peoples that can be grouped together as the Canaanites. Once again, all that was known of them until rather recently appeared in references (mostly adverse) in the Old Testament and scattered Phoenician inscriptions.

Archaeologists were only beginning to understand the Canaanites when two discoveries came to light: certain Egyptian texts at Luxor and Saqqara, and, much more important, historical, literary, and religious texts unearthed at a major Canaanite center. The place, now called Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast, was the ancient city of Ugarit.

The language of the Ugarit inscriptions, the Canaanite language, was what scholars call West Semitic, a branch of the group of languages that also includes the earliest Akkadian and present-day Hebrew. Indeed, anyone who knows Hebrew well can follow the Canaanite inscriptions with relative ease. The language, literary style, and terminology are reminiscent of the Old Testament.

The pantheon that unfolds from the Canaanite texts bears many similarities to the later Greek one. At the head of the Canaanite pantheon, too, there was a supreme deity called El, a word that was both the personal name of the god and the generic term meaning "lofty deity." He was the final authority in all affairs, human or divine. Ab Adam ("father of man”) was his title; the Kindly, the Merciful was his epithet.

He was the "creator of things created, and the one who alone could bestow kingship."

The Canaanite texts ("myths" to most scholars) depicted El as a sage, elderly deity who stayed away from daily affairs. His abode was remote, at the "headwaters of the two rivers" - the Tigris and Euphrates. There he would sit on his throne, receive emissaries, and contemplate the problems and disputes the other gods brought before him.

A stela found in Palestine depicts an elderly deity sitting on a throne and being served a beverage by a younger deity. The seated deity wears a conical headdress adorned with horns - a mark of the gods, as we have seen, from prehistoric times - and the scene is dominated by the symbol of a winged star - the ubiquitous emblem that we shall increasingly encounter.

It is generally accepted by the scholars that this sculptured relief depicts El, the senior Canaanite deity.

El, however, was not always an olden lord.

One of his epithets was Tor (meaning "bull"), signifying, scholars believe, his sexual prowess and his role as Father of the Gods. A Canaanite poem, called "Birth of the Gracious Gods," placed El at the seashore (probably naked), where two women were completely charmed by the size of his penis. While a bird was roasting on the beach, El had intercourse with the two women. Thus were the two gods Shahar ("dawn") and Shalem ("completion" or "dusk") born.

These were not his only children nor his principal sons (of which he had, apparently, seven). His principal son was Baal - again the personal name of the deity, as well as the general term for "lord." As the Greeks did in their tales, the Canaanites spoke of the challenges by the son to the authority and rule of his father.

Like El his father, Baal was what the scholars call a Storm God, a God of Thunder and Lightning. A nickname for Baal was Hadad ("sharp one"). His weapons were the battle-ax and the lightning-spear; his cult animal, like El's, was the bull, and, like El, he was depicted wearing the conical headdress adorned with a pair of horns.

Baal was also called Elyon ("supreme"); that is, the acknowledged prince, the heir apparent. But he had not come by this title without a struggle, first with his brother Yam ("prince of the sea"), and then with his brother Mot.

A long and touching poem, pieced together from numerous fragmented tablets, begins with the summoning of the "Master Craftsman" to El's abode "at the sources of the waters, in the midst of the headwaters of the two rivers":

Through the fields of El he comes

He enters the pavilion of the Father of Years.

At El's feet he bows, falls down,

Prostrates himself, paying homage.

The Master Craftsman is ordered to erect a palace for Yam as the mark of his rise to power.

Emboldened by this, Yam sends his messengers to the assembly of the gods, to ask for the surrender to him of Baal. Yam instructs his emissaries to be defiant, and the assembled gods do yield. Even El accepts the new lineup among his sons. "Ba'al is thy slave, O Yam," he declares.

The supremacy of Yam, however, was short-lived. Armed with two "divine weapons," Baal struggled with Yam and defeated him - only to be challenged by Mot (the name meant "smiter"). In this struggle, Baal was soon vanquished; but his sister Anat refused to accept this demise of Baal as final. "She seized Mot, the son of El, and with a blade she cleaved him."

The obliteration of Mot led, according to the Canaanite tale, to the miraculous resurrection of Baal. Scholars have attempted to rationalize the report by suggesting that the whole tale was only allegorical, representing no more than a tale of the annual struggle in the Near East between the hot, rainless summers that dry out the vegetation, and the coming of the rainy season in the autumn, which revives or "resurrects" the vegetation.

But there is no doubt that the Canaanite tale intended no allegory, that it related what were then believed to be the true events: how the sons of the chief deity fought among themselves, and how one of them defied defeat to reappear and become the accepted heir, making El rejoice:

El, the kindly one, the merciful, rejoices.

His feet on the footstool he sets.

He opens his throat and laughs;

He raises his voice and cries out:

"I shall sit and take my ease,

The soul shall repose in my breast;

For Ba'al the mighty is alive,

For the Prince of Earth exists!"

Anat, according to Canaanite traditions, thus stood by her brother the Lord (Baal) in his life-and-death struggle with the evil Mot; and the parallel between this and the Greek tradition of the goddess Athena standing with the supreme god Zeus in his life-and-death struggle with Typhon is only too obvious.

Athena, as we have seen, was called "the perfect maiden," yet had many illicit love affairs. Likewise, Canaanite traditions (which preceded the Greek ones) employed the epithet "the Maiden Anat," and, in spite of this, proceeded to report her various love affairs, especially with her own brother Baal. One text describes the arrival of Anat at Baal's abode on Mount Zaphon, and Baal's hurried dismissal of his wives.

Then he sank by his sister's feet; they looked into each other's eyes; they anointed each other's "horns" -

He seizes and holds her womb. . . .

She seizes and holds his "stones.". . .

The maiden Anat... is made to conceive and bear.

No wonder, then, that Anat was often depicted completely naked, to emphasize her sexual attributes - as in this seal impression, which illustrates a helmeted Baal battling another god.

Like the Greek religion and its direct forerunners, the Canaanite pantheon included a Mother Goddess, official consort of the chief deity.

They called her Ashera; she paralleled the Greek Hera. Astarte (the biblical Ashtoreth) paralleled Aphrodite; her frequent consort was Athtar, who was associated with a bright planet, and who probably paralleled Ares, Aphrodite's brother. There were other young deities, male and female, whose astral or Greek parallels can easily be surmised.

But besides these young deities there were the "olden gods," aloof from mundane affairs but available when the gods themselves ran into serious trouble. Some of their sculptures, even in a partly damaged state, show them with commanding features, gods recognizable by their horned headgear.

Whence had the Canaanites, for their part, drawn their culture and religion?

The Old Testament considered them a part of the Hamitic family of nations, with roots in the hot (for that is what ham meant) lands of Africa, brothers of the Egyptians. The artifacts and written records unearthed by archaeologists confirm the close affinity between the two, as well as the many similarities between the Canaanite and Egyptian deities.

The many national and local gods, the multitude of their names and epithets, the diversity of their roles, emblems, and animal mascots at first cast the gods of Egypt as an unfathomable crowd of actors upon a strange stage.

But a closer look reveals that they were essentially no different from those of the other lands of the ancient world.

The Egyptians believed in Gods of Heaven arid Earth, Great Gods that were clearly distinguished from the multitudes of lesser deities.

G. A. Wainwright (The Sky-Religion in Egypt) summed up the evidence, showing that the Egyptian belief in Gods of Heaven who descended to Earth from the skies was "extremely ancient." Some of the epithets of these Great Gods - Greatest God, Bull of Heaven, Lord/Lady of the Mountains - sound familiar.

Although the Egyptians counted by the decimal system, their religious affairs were governed by the Sumerian sexagesimal sixty, and celestial matters were subject to the divine number twelve. The heavens were divided into three parts, each comprising twelve celestial bodies. The afterworld was divided into twelve parts. Day and night were each divided into twelve hours.

And all these divisions were paralleled by "companies" of gods, which in turn consisted of twelve gods each.

The head of the Egyptian pantheon was Ra ("creator"), who presided over an Assembly of the Gods that numbered twelve.

He performed his wondrous works of creation in primeval times, bringing forth Geb ("Earth") and Nut ("sky"). Then he caused the plants to grow on Earth, and the creeping creatures - and, finally, Man. Ra was an unseen celestial god who manifested himself only periodically. His manifestation was the Aten - the Celestial Disc, depicted as a Winged Globe.

The appearance and activities of Ra on Earth were, according to Egyptian tradition, directly connected with kingship in Egypt. According to that tradition, the first rulers of Egypt were not men but gods, and the first god to rule over Egypt was Ra. He then divided the kingdom, giving Lower Egypt to his son Osiris and Upper Egypt to his son Seth.

But Seth schemed to overthrow Osiris and eventually had Osiris drowned. Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris, retrieved the mutilated body of Osiris and resur-rected him. Thereafter, he went through "the secret gates" and joined Ra in his celestial path; his place on the throne of Egypt was taken over by his son Horus, who was sometimes depicted as a winged and horned deity.

Though Ra was the loftiest in the heavens, upon Earth he was the son of the god Ptah ("developer," "one who fashioned things"). The Egyptians believed that Ptah actually raised the land of Egypt from under floodwaters by building dike works at the point where the Nile rises.

This Great God, they said, had come to Egypt from elsewhere; he established not only Egypt but also "the mountain land and the far foreign land." Indeed, the Egyptians acknowledged, all their "olden gods" had come by boat from the south; and many prehistoric rock drawings have been found that show these olden gods - distinguished by their horned headdress - arriving in Egypt by boat.

The only sea route leading to Egypt from the south is the Red Sea, and it is significant that the Egyptian name for it was the Sea of Ur.

Hieroglyphically, the sign for Ur meant "the far-foreign [land] in the east"; that it actually may also have referred to -he Sumerian Ur, lying in that very direction, cannot be ruled out.

The Egyptian word for "divine being" or "god" was NTR, which meant "one who watches." Significantly, that is exactly the meaning of the name Shumer: the land of the "ones who watch."

The earlier notion that civilization may have begun in Egypt has been discarded by now. There is ample evidence now showing that the Egyptian-organized society and civilization, which began half a millennium and more after the Sumerian one, drew its culture, architecture, technology, art of writing, and many other aspects of a high civilization from Sumer. The weight of evidence also shows that the gods of Egypt originated in Sumer.

Cultural and blood kinsmen of the Egyptians, the Canaanites shared the same gods with them. But, situated in the land strip that was the bridge between Asia and Africa from time immemorial, the Canaanites also came under strong Semitic or Mesopotamian influences. Like the Hittites to the north, the Humans to the northeast, the Egyptians to the south, the Canaanites could not boast of an original pantheon. They, too, acquired their cosmogony, deities, and legendary tales from elsewhere.

Their direct contacts with the Sumerian sources were the Amorites.

The land of the Amorites lay between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean lands of western Asia. Their name derives from the Akkadian amurru and Sumerian martu ("westerners"). They were not treated as aliens but as related people who dwelt in the western provinces of Sumer and Akkad.

Persons bearing Amorite names were listed as temple functionaries in Sumer. When Ur fell to Elamite invaders circa 2000 B.C., a Martu named Ishbi-Irra reestablished Sumerian kingship at Larsa and made his first task the recapture of Ur and the restoration there of the great shrine to the god Sin. Amorite "chieftains" established the first independent dynasty in Assyria circa 1900 B.C.

And Hammurabi, who brought greatness to Babylon circa 1800 B.C., was the sixth successor of the first dynasty of Babylon, which was Amorite.

In the 1930s archaeologists came upon the center and capital city of the Amorites, known as Mari. At a bend of the Euphrates, where the Syrian border now cuts the river, the diggers uncovered a major city whose buildings were erected and continuously reerected, between 3000 and 2000 B.C., on foundations that date to centuries earlier. These earliest remains included a step pyramid and temples to the Sumerian deities Inanna, Ninhursag, and Enlil.

The palace of Mari alone occupied some five acres and included a throne room painted with most striking murals, three hundred various rooms, scribal chambers, and (most important to the historian) well over twenty thousand tablets in the cuneiform script, dealing with the economy, trade, politics, and social life of those times, with state and military matters, and, of course, with the religion of the land and its people.

One of the wall paintings at the great palace of Mari depicts the investiture of the king Zimri-Lim by the goddess Inanna (whom the Amorites called Ishtar).

As in the other pantheons, the chief deity physically present among the Amurru was a weather or storm god.

They called him Adad - the equivalent of the Canaanite Baal ("lord") - and they nicknamed him Hadad. His symbol, as might be expected, was fork lightning.

In Canaanite texts, Baal is often called the "Son of Dagon." The Mari texts also speak of an older deity named Dagan, a "Lord of Abundance" who - like El - is depicted as a retired deity, who complained on one occasion that he was no longer consulted on the conduct of a certain war.

Other members of the pantheon included the Moon God, whom the Canaanites called Yerah, the Akkadians Sin, and the Sumerians Nannar; the Sun God, commonly called Shamash; and other deities whose identities leave no doubt that Mari was a bridge (geographically and chronologically) connecting the lands and the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean with the Mesopotamian .sources.

Among the finds at Mari, as elsewhere in the lands of Sumer, there were dozens of statues of the people themselves: kings, nobles, priests, singers.

They were invariably depicted with their hands clasped in prayer, their gaze frozen forever toward their gods.

Who were these Gods of Heaven and Earth, divine yet human, always headed by a pantheon or inner circle of twelve deities?

We have entered the temples of the Greeks and the Aryans, the Hittites and the Hurrians, the Canaanites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. We have followed paths that took us across continents and seas, and clues that carried us over several millennia.

And all the corridors of all the temples have led us to one source: Sumer.

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SUMER - LAND OF THE GODS

THERE IS NO DOUBT that the "olden words," which for thousands of years constituted the language of higher learning and religious scriptures, was the language of Sumer. There is also no doubt that the "olden gods" were the gods of Sumer; records and tales and genealogies and histories of gods older than those pertaining to the gods of Sumer have not been found anywhere.

When these gods (in their original Sumerian forms or in the later Akkadian, Babylonian, or Assyrian) are named and counted, the list runs into the hundreds. But once they are classified, it is clear that they were not a hodgepodge of divinities.

They were headed by a pantheon of Great Gods, governed by an Assembly of the Deities, and related to each other. Once the numerous lesser nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and the like are excluded, a much smaller and coherent group of deities emerges - each with a role to play, each with certain powers or responsibilities.

There were, the Sumerians believed, gods that were "of the heavens." Texts dealing with the time "before things were created" talk of such heavenly gods as Apsu, Tiamat, Anshar, Kishar. No claim is ever made that the gods of this category ever appeared upon Earth. As we look closer at these "gods," who existed before Earth was created, we shall realize that they were the celestial bodies that make up our solar system; and, as we shall show, the so-called Sumerian myths regarding these celestial beings are, in fact, precise and scientifically plausible cosmologic concepts regarding the creation of our solar system.

There were also lesser gods who were "of Earth." Their cult centers were mostly provincial towns; they were no more than local deities. At best, they were given charge of some limited operation - as, for example, the goddess NIN.KASHI ('lady-beer"), who supervised the preparation of beverages. Of them, no heroic tales were told.

They possessed no awesome weapons, and the other gods did not shudder at their command. They remind one very much of the company of young gods that marched last in the procession depicted on the rocks of Hittite Yazilikaya.

Between the two groups there were the Gods of Heaven and Earth, the ones called "the ancient gods." They were the "olden gods" of the epic tales, and, in the Sumerian belief, they had come down to Earth from the heavens.

These were no mere local deities. They were national gods - indeed, international gods. Some of them were present and active upon Earth even before there were Men upon Earth. Indeed, the very existence of Man was deemed to have been the result of a deliberate creative enterprise on the part of these gods. They were powerful, capable of feats beyond mortal ability or comprehension. Yet these gods not only looked like humans but ate and drank like them and displayed virtually every human emotion of love and hate, loyalty and infidelity.

Although the roles and hierarchical standing of some of the principal deities shifted over the millennia, a number of them never lost their paramount position and their national and international veneration. As we take a close look at this central group, there emerges a picture of a dynasty of gods, a divine family, closely related yet bitterly divided.

The head of this family of Gods of Heaven and Earth was AN (or Anu in the Babylonian/Assyrian texts). He was the Great Father of the Gods, the King of the Gods. His realm was the expanse of the heavens, and his symbol was a star.

In the Sumerian pictographic writing, the sign of a star also stood for An, for "heavens," and for "divine being," or "god" (descended of An).

This fourfold meaning of the symbol remained through the ages, as the script moved from the Sumerian pictographic to the cuneiform Akkadian, to the stylized Babylonian and Assyrian.

From the very earliest times until the cuneiform script faded away - from the fourth millennium B.C. almost to the time of Christ - this symbol preceded the names of the gods, indicating that the name written in the text was not of a mortal, but of a deity of heavenly origin.

Anu's abode, and the seat of his Kingship, was in the heavens.

That was where the other Gods of Heaven and Earth went when they needed individual advice or favor, or where they met in assembly to settle disputes among themselves or to reach major decisions. Numerous texts describe Anu's palace (whose portals were guarded by a god of the Tree of Truth and a god of the Tree of Life), his throne, the manner in which other gods approached him, and how they sat in his presence.

The Sumerian texts could also recall instances when not only the other gods but even some chosen mortals were permitted to go up to Anu's abode, mostly with the object of escaping mortality. One such tale pertained to Adapa ("model of Man"). He was so perfect and so loyal to the god Ea, who had created him, that Ea arranged for him to be taken to Anu.

Ea then described to Adapa what to expect.

Adapa,

thou art going before Anu, the King;

The road to Heaven thou wilt take.

When to Heaven thou hast ascended,

and hast approached the gate of Anu,

the "Bearer of Life" and the "Grower of Truth"

at the gate of Anu will be standing.

Guided by his creator, Adapa,

"to Heaven went up ... ascended to Heaven and approached the gate of Anu."

But when he was offered the chance to become immortal, Adapa refused to eat the Bread of Life, thinking that the angry Anu offered him poisoned food. He was thus returned to Earth as an anointed priest but still a mortal.

The Sumerian claim that not only gods but also selected mortals could ascend to the Divine Abode in the heavens is echoed in the Old Testament tales of the ascents to the heavens by Enoch and the prophet Elijah.

Though Anu lived in a Heavenly Abode, the Sumerian texts reported instances when he came down to Earth - either at times of great crisis, or on ceremonial visits (when he was accompanied by his spouse ANTU), or (at least once) to make his great-granddaughter IN.ANNA his consort on Earth.

Since he did not permanently reside on Earth, there was apparently no need to grant him exclusivity over his own city or cult center; and the abode, or "high house," erected for him was located at Uruk (the biblical Erech), the domain of the goddess Inanna.

The ruins of Uruk include to this day a huge man-made mound, where archaeologists have found evidence of the construction and reconstruction of a high temple - the temple of Anu; no less than eighteen strata or distinct phases were discovered there, indicating the existence of compelling reasons to maintain the temple at that sacred site.

The temple of Anu was called E.ANNA ("house of An"). But this simple name applied to a structure that, at least at some of its phases, was quite a sight to behold. It was, according to Sumerian texts,

"the hallowed E-Anna, the pure sanctuary."

Traditions maintained that the Great Gods themselves "had fashioned its parts."

"Its cornice was like copper"

"its great wall touching the clouds - a lofty dwelling place"

"it was the House whose charm was irresistible, whose allure was unending"

And the texts also made clear the temple's purpose, for they called it "the House for descending from Heaven."

A tablet that belonged to an archive at Uruk enlightens us as to the pomp and pageantry that accompanied the arrival of Anu and his spouse on a "state visit." Because of damage to the tablet, we can read of the ceremonies only from some midpoint, when Ami and Antu were already seated in the temple's courtyard. The gods, "exactly in the same order as before," then formed a procession ahead of and behind the bearer of the scepter.

The protocol then instructed:

They shall then descend to the Exalted Court,

and shall turn towards the god Anu.

The Priest of Purification shall libate the Scepter,

and the Scepter-bearer shall enter and be seated.

The deities Papsukal, Nusku and Shala

shall then be seated in the court of the god Anu.

Meanwhile, the goddesses,

"The Divine Offspring of Anu, Uruk's Divine Daughters," bore a second object, whose name or purpose are unclear, to the E.NIR, "The House of the Golden Bed of the Goddess Antu."

Then they returned in a procession to the courtyard, to the place where Antu was seated.

While the evening meal was being prepared according to a strict ritual, a special priest smeared a mixture of "good oil" and wine on the door sockets of the sanctuary to which Anu and Antu were later to retire for the night - a thoughtful touch intended, it seems, to eliminate squeaking of the doors while the two deities slept.

While an "evening meal" - various drinks and appetizers - was being served, an astronomer-priest went up to the "topmost stage of the tower of the main temple" to observe the skies. He was to look out for the rising in a specific part of the sky of the planet named Great Anu of Heaven.

Thereupon, he was to recite the compositions named,

"To the one who grows bright, the heavenly planet of the Lord Anu," and "The Creator's image has risen."

Once the planet had been sighted and the poems recited, Anu and Antu washed their hands with water out of a golden basin and the first part of the feast began.

Then, the seven Great Gods also washed their hands from seven large golden trays and the second part of the feast began. The "rite of washing of the mouth" was then performed; the priests recited the hymn "The planet of Anu is Heaven's hero."

Torches were lit, and the gods, priests, singers, and food-bearers arranged themselves in a procession, accompanying the two visitors to their sanctuary for the night.

Four major deities were assigned to remain in the courtyard and keep watch until daybreak. Others were stationed at various designated gates. Meanwhile, the whole country was to light up and celebrate the presence of the two divine visitors. On a signal from the main temple, the priests of all the other temples of Uruk were "to use torches to start bonfires"; and the priests in other cities, seeing the bonfires at Uruk, were to do likewise.

Then:

The people of the Land shall light fires in their homes,

and shall offer banquets to all the gods....

The guards of the cities shall light fires

in the streets and in the squares.

The departure of the two Great Gods was also planned, not only to the day but to the minute.

On the seventeenth day,

forty minutes after sunrise,

the gate shall be opened before the gods Anu and

Antu,

bringing to an end their overnight stay.

While the end of this tablet has broken off, another text in all probability describes the departure: the morning meal, the incantations, the handshakes ("grasping of the hands") by the other gods.

The Great Gods were then carried to their point of departure on thronelike litters carried on the shoulders of temple functionaries. An Assyrian depiction of a procession of deities (though from a much later time) probably gives us a good idea of the manner in which Anu and Antu were carried during their procession in Uruk.

Special incantations were recited when the procession was passing through "the street of the gods"; other psalms and hymns were sung as the procession neared "the holy quay" and when it reached "the dike of the ship of Anu."

Good-byes were then said, and yet more incantations were recited and sung "with hand-raising gestures."

Then all the priests and temple functionaries who carried the gods, led by the great priest, offered a special "prayer of departure." "Great Ami, may Heaven and Earth bless you!" they intoned seven times. They prayed for the blessing of the seven celestial gods and invoked the gods that were in Heaven and the gods that were upon Earth.

In conclusion, they bade farewell to Anu and Antu, thus:

May the Gods of the Deep,

and the Gods of the Divine Abode,

bless you!

May they bless you daily -

every day of every month of every year!

Among the thousands upon thousands of depictions of the ancient gods that have been uncovered, none seems to depict Anu.

Yet he peers at us from every statue and every portrait of every king that ever was, from antiquity to our very own days. For Anu was not only the Great King, King of the Gods, but also the one by whose grace others could be crowned as kings. By Sumerian tradition, rulership flowed from Anu; and the very term for "Kingship" was Anutu ("Anu-ship").

The insignia of Anu were the tiara (the divine headdress), the scepter (symbol of power), and the staff (symbolizing the guidance provided by the shepherd).

The shepherd's staff may now be found more in the hands of bishops than of kings. But the crown and scepter are still held by whatever kings Mankind has left on some thrones.

The second most powerful deity of the Sumerian pantheon was EN.LIL. His name meant "lord of the airspace" - the prototype and father of the later Storm Gods that were to head the pantheons of the ancient world.

He was Anu's eldest son, born at his father's Heavenly Abode. But at some point in the earliest times he descended to Earth, and was thus the principal God of Heaven and Earth. When the gods met in assembly at the Heavenly Abode, Enlil presided over the meetings alongside his father.

When the gods met for assembly on Earth, they met at Enlil's court in the divine precinct of Nippur, the city dedicated to Enlil and the site of his main temple, the E.KUR ("house which is like a mountain").

Not only the Sumerians but the very gods of Sumer considered Enlil supreme. They called him Ruler of All the Lands, and made it clear that "in Heaven - he is the Prince; On Earth - he is the Chief."

His "word [command] high above made the Heavens tremble, down below made the Earth quake":

Enlil,

Whose command is far reaching;

Whose "word" is lofty and holy;

Whose pronouncement is unchangeable;

Who decrees destinies unto the distant future....

The Gods of Earth bow down willingly before him;

The Heavenly gods who are on Earth

humble themselves before him;

They stand by faithfully, according to instructions.

Enlil, according to Sumerian beliefs, arrived on Earth well before Earth became settled and civilized.

A "Hymn to Enlil, the All-Beneficent" recounts the many aspects of society and civilization that would not have existed had it not been for Enlil's instructions to "execute his orders, far and wide."

No cities would be built, no settlements founded; No stalls would be built, no sheepfolds erected; No king would be raised, no high priest born.

The Sumerian texts also stated that Enlil arrived on Earth before the "Black-Headed People" - the Sumerian nickname for Mankind - were created. During such pre-Mankind times, Enlil erected Nippur as his center, or "command post," at which Heaven and Earth were connected through some "bond."

The Sumerian texts called this bond DUR.AN.KI ("bond heaven-earth") and used poetic language to describe Enlil's first actions on Earth:

Enlil,

When you marked off divine settlements on Earth,

Nippur you set up as your very own city.

The City of Earth, the lofty,

Your pure place whose water is sweet.

You founded the Dur-An-Ki

In the center of the four corners of the world.

In those early days, when gods alone inhabited Nippur and Man had not yet been created, Enlil met the goddess who was to become his wife. According to one version, Enlil saw his future bride while she was bathing in Nippur's stream - naked.

It was love at first sight, but not necessarily with marriage in mind:

The shepherd Enlil, who decrees the fates,

The Bright-Eyed One, saw her.

The lord speaks to her of intercourse;

she is unwilling.

Enlil speaks to her of intercourse;

she is unwilling:

"My vagina is too small [she said],

It knows no copulation;

My lips are too little,

they know not kissing."

But Enlil did not take no for an answer.

He disclosed to his chamberlain Nushku his burning desire for "the young maid," who was called SUD ("the nurse"), and who lived with her mother at E.RESH ("scented house"). Nushku suggested a boat ride and brought up a boat. Enlil persuaded Sud to go sailing with him. Once they were in the boat, he raped her.

The ancient tale then relates that though Enlil was chief of the gods they were so enraged that they seized him and banished him to the Lower World.

"Enlil, immoral one!" they shouted at him. "Get thyself out of the city!"

This version has it that Sud, pregnant with Enlil's child, followed him, and he married her. Another version has the repentant Enlil searching for the girl and sending his chamberlain to her mother to ask for the girl's hand. One way or another, Sud did become the wife of Enlil, and he bestowed on her the title NIN.LIL ("lady of the airspace").

But little did he and the gods who banished him know that it was not Enlil who had seduced Ninlil, but the other way around. The truth of the matter was that Ninlil bathed naked in the stream on her mother's instructions, with the hope that Enlil - who customarily took his walks by the stream - would notice Ninlil and wish to "forthwith embrace you, kiss you."

In spite of the manner in which the two fell for each other, Ninlil was held in the highest esteem once she was given by Enlil "the garment of ladyship."

With one exception, which (we believe) had to do with dynastic succession, Enlil is never known to have had other indiscretions. A votive tablet found at Nippur shows Enlil and Ninlil being served food and beverage at their temple. The tablet was commissioned by Ur-Enlil, the "Domestic of Enlil."

Apart from being chief of the gods, Enlil was also deemed the supreme Lord of Sumer (sometimes simply called "The Land") and its "Black-Headed People."

A Sumerian psalm spoke in veneration of this god:

Lord who knows the destiny of The Land,

trustworthy in his calling; Enlil who knows the destiny of Sumer,

trustworthy in his calling; Father Enlil,

Lord of all the lands;

Father Enlil,

Lord of the Rightful Command; Father Enlil,

Shepherd of the Black-Headed Ones. ... From the Mountain of Sunrise

to the Mountain of Sunset, There is no other Lord in the land;

you alone are King.

The Sumerians revered Enlil out of both fear and gratitude.

It was he who made sure that decrees by the Assembly of the Gods were carried out against Mankind; it was his "wind" that Hew obliterating storms against offending cities. It was he who, at the time of the Deluge, sought the destruction of Mankind. But when at peace with Mankind, he was a friendly god who bestowed favors; according to the Sumerian text, the knowledge of fanning, together with the plow and the pickax, were granted to Mankind by Enlil.

Enlil also selected the kings who were to rule over Mankind, not as sovereigns but as servants of the god entrusted with the administration of divine laws of justice. Accordingly, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian kings opened their inscriptions of self-adoration by describing how Enlil had called them to Kingship.

These "calls" - issued by Enlil on behalf of himself and his father Anu - granted legitimacy to the ruler and outlined his functions.

Even Hammurabi, who acknowledged a god named Marduk as the national god of Babylon, prefaced his code of laws by stating that,

"Anu and Enlil named me to promote the welfare of the people... to cause justice to prevail in the land."

God of Heaven and Earth, Firstborn of Anu, Dispenser of Kingship, Chief Executive of the Assembly of the Gods, Father of Gods and Men, Granter of Agriculture, Lord of the Airspace - these were some of the attributes of Enlil that bespoke his greatness and powers.

His "command was far reaching," his "pronouncements unchangeable"; he "decreed the destinies." He possessed the "bond heaven-earth," and from his "awesome city Nippur" he could "raise the beams that search the heart of all the lands" - "eyes that could scan all the lands."

Yet he was as human as any young man enticed by a naked beauty; subject to moral laws imposed by the community of the gods, transgressions of which were punishable by banishment; and not even immune to mortal complaints.

At least in one known instance, a Sumerian king of Ur complained directly to the Assembly of the Gods that a series of troubles that had befallen Ur and her people could be traced back to the ill-fated fact that,

"Enlil did give the kingship to a worthless man... who is not of Sumerian seed."

As we go along, we shall see the central role that Enlil played in divine and mortal affairs on Earth, and how his several sons battled among themselves and with others for the divine succession, undoubtedly giving rise to the later tales of the battles of the gods.

The third Great God of Sumer was another son of Anu; he bore two names, E.A and EN.KI. Like his brother Enlil, he, too, was a God of Heaven and Earth, a deity originally of the heavens, who had come down to Earth.

His arrival on Earth is associated in Sumerian texts with A time when the waters of the Persian Gulf reached inland much farther than nowadays, turning the southern part of the country into marshlands. Ea (the name meant literally "house-water"), who was a master engineer, planned and supervised the construction of canals, the diking of the rivers, and the draining of the marshlands. He loved to go sailing on these waterways, and especially in the marshlands.

The waters, as his name denoted, were indeed his home. He built his "great house" in the city he had founded at the edge of the marshlands, a city appropriately named HA.A.KI ("place of the water-fishes"); it was also known as E.RI.DU ("home of going afar").

Ea was "Lord of the Saltwaters," the seas and oceans. Sumerian texts speak repeatedly of a very early time when the three Great Gods divided the realms among them. "The seas they had given to Enki, the Prince of Earth," thereby giving Enki "the rulership of the Apsu" (the "Deep"). As Lord of the Seas, Ea built ships that sailed to far lands, and especially to places from which precious metals and semiprecious stones were brought to Sumer.

The earliest Sumerian cylinder seals depicted Ea as a deity surrounded by flowing streams that were sometimes shown to contain fish. The seals associated Ea, as shown here, with the Moon (indicated by its crescent), an association stemming perhaps from the fact that the Moon caused the tides of the seas.

It was no doubt in reference to such an astral image that Ea was given the epithet NIN.IGI.KU ('lord bright-eye").

According to the Sumerian texts, including a truly amazing autobiography by Ea himself, he was born in the heavens and came down to Earth before there was any settlement or civilization upon Earth.

"When I approached the land, there was much flooding," he stated.

He then proceeded to describe the series of actions taken by him to make the land habitable: He filled the Tigris River with fresh, "life-giving waters"; he appointed a god to supervise the construction of canals, to make the Tigris and Euphrates navigable; and he unclogged the marshlands, filling them up with fish and making them a haven for birds of all kinds, and causing to grow there reeds that were a useful building material.

Turning from the seas and rivers to the dry land, Ea claimed that it was he who,

"directed the plow and the yoke... opened the holy furrows... built the stalls... erected sheepfolds."

Continuing, the self-adulatory text (named by scholars "Enki and the World Order") credited the god with bringing to Earth the arts of brickmaking, construction of dwellings and cities, metallurgy, and so on.

Presenting the deity as Mankind's greatest benefactor, the god who brought about civilization, many texts also depicted him as Mankind's chief protagonist at the councils of the gods. Sumerian and Akkadian Deluge texts, on which the biblical account must have drawn, depict Ea as the god who - in defiance of the decision of the Assembly of the Gods - enabled a trusted follower (the Mesopotamian "Noah") to escape the disaster.

Indeed, the Sumerian and Akkadian texts, which (like the Old Testament) adhered to the belief that a god or the gods created Man through a conscious and deliberate act, attribute to Ea a key role: As the chief scientist of the gods, he outlined the method and the process by which Man was to be created. With such affinity to the "creation" or emergence of Man, no wonder that it was Ea who guided Adapa - the "model man" created by Ea's "wisdom" - to the abode of Anu in the heavens, in defiance of the gods' determination to withhold "eternal life" from Mankind.

Was Ea on the side of Man simply because he had a hand in his creation, or did he have other, more subjective motives? As we scan the record, we find that invariably Ea's defiance - in mortal and divine matters alike - was! aimed mostly at frustrating decisions or plans emanating from Enlil.

The record is replete with indications of Ea's burning! jealousy of his brother Enlil.

Indeed, Ea's other (and perhaps first) name was EN.KI ("lord of Earth"), and the' texts dealing with the division of the world among the three gods hint that it may have been simply by a drawing of lots that Ea lost mastery of Earth to his brother Enlil.

The gods had clasped hands together,

Had cast lots and had divided.

Anu then went up to Heaven;

To Enlil the Earth was made subject.

The seas, enclosed as with a loop,

They had given to Enki, the Prince of Earth.

As bitter as Ea/Enki may have been about the results of this drawing, he appears to have nurtured a much deeper resentment.

The reason is given by Enki himself in his autobiography: It was he, not Enlil, who was firstborn, Enki claimed; it was then he, and not Enlil, who was entitled to be the heir apparent to Anu:

"My father, the king of the universe,

brought me forth in the universe....

I am the fecund seed,

engendered by the Great Wild Bull;

I am the first born son of Anu.

I am the Great Brother of the gods. ...

I am he who has been born

as the first son of the divine Anu."

Since the codes of laws by which men lived in the ancient Near East were given by the gods, it stands to reason that the social and family laws applying to men were copies of those applying to the gods.

Court and family records found at such sites as Mari and Nuzi have confirmed that the biblical customs and laws by which the Hebrew patriarchs lived were the laws by which kings and noblemen were bound throughout the ancient Near East. The succession problems the patriarchs faced are therefore instructive.

Abraham, deprived of a child by the apparent barrenness of his wife Sarah, had a firstborn son by her maidservant. Yet this son (Ishmael) was excluded from the patriarchal succession as soon as Sarah herself bore Abraham a son, Isaac.

Isaac's wife Rebecca was pregnant with twins. The one who was technically firstborn was Esau - a reddish, hairy, and rugged fellow. Holding onto Esau's heel was the more refined Jacob, whom Rebecca cherished. When the aging and half-blind Isaac was about to proclaim his testament, Rebecca used a ruse to have the blessing of succession bestowed on Jacob rather than on Esau.

Finally, Jacob's succession problems resulted from the fact that though he served Laban for twenty years to get the hand of Rachel in marriage, Laban forced him to marry her older sister Leah first. It was Leah who bore Jacob his first son (Reuben), and he had more sons and a daughter by her and by two concubines. Yet when Rachel finally bore him her firstborn son (Joseph), Jacob preferred him over his brothers.

Against the background of such customs and succession laws, one can understand the conflicting claims between Enlil and Ea/Enki. Enlil, by all records the son of Anu and his official consort Antu, was the legal firstborn.

But the anguished cry of Enki:

"I am the fecund seed ... I am the first born son of Anu," must have been a statement of fact.

Was he then born to Anu, but by another goddess who was only a concubine? The tale of Isaac and Ishmael, or the story of the twins Esau and Jacob, may have had a prior parallel in the Heavenly Abode.

Though Enki appears to have accepted Enlil's succession prerogatives, some scholars see enough evidence to show a continuing power struggle between the two gods.

Samuel N. Kramer has titled one of the ancient texts "Enki and His Inferiority Complex."

As we shall see later on, several biblical tales - of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, or the tale of the Deluge - involve in their original Sumerian versions instances of defiance by Enki of his brother's edicts.

At some point, it seems, Enid decided that there was no sense to his struggle for the Divine Throne; and he put his efforts into making a son of his - rather than a son of Enlil - the third-generation successor. This he sought to achieve, at least at first, with the aid of his sister NIN.HUR.SAG ("lady of the mountainhead").

She, too, was a daughter of Anu, but evidently not by Antu, and therein lay another rule of succession. Scholars have wondered in years past why both Abraham and Isaac advertised the fact that their respective wives were also their sisters - a puzzling claim in view of the biblical prohibition against sexual relations with a sister.

But as the legal documents were unearthed at Mari and Nuzi, it became clear that a man could marry a half-sister. Moreover, when all the children of all the wives were considered, the son born of such a wife - being fifty percent more of the "pure seed" than a son by an unrelated wife - was the legal heir whether or not he was the firstborn son. This, incidentally, led (in Mari and Nuzi) to the practice of adopting the preferred wife as a "sister" in order to make her son the unchallenged legal heir.

It was of such a half-sister, Ninhursag, that Enki sought to have a son. She, too, was "of the heavens," having come to Earth in earliest times. Several texts state that when the gods were dividing Earth's domains among themselves, she was given the Land of Dilmun -

"a pure place... a pure land... a place most bright."

A text named by the scholars "Enki and Ninhursag - a Paradise Myth" deals with Enki's trip to Dilmun for conjugal purposes.

Ninhursag, the text repeatedly stresses, "was alone" - unattached, a spinster. Though in later times she was depicted as an old matron, she must have been very attractive when she was younger, for the text informs us unabashedly that, when Enki neared her, the sight of her "caused his penis to water the dikes."

Instructing that they be left alone, Enki "poured the semen in the womb of Ninhursag. She took the semen into the womb, the semen of Enki"; and then, "after the nine months of Womanhood... she gave birth at the bank of the waters." But the child was a daughter.

Having failed to obtain a male heir, Enki then proceeded to make love to his own daughter. "He embraced her, he

kissed her; Enki poured the semen into the womb." But she, too, bore him a daughter. Enki then went after his granddaughter and made her pregnant, too; but once again the offspring was a female. Determined to stop these efforts, Ninhursag put a curse on him whereby Enki, having eaten some plants, became mortally sick. The other gods, however, forced Ninhursag to remove the curse.

While these events had great bearing on divine affairs, other tales pertaining to Enki and Ninhursag have great bearing on human affairs; for, according to the Sumerian texts, Man was created by Ninhursag following processes and formulas devised by Enki.

She was the chief nurse, the one in charge of medical facilities; it was in that role that the goddess was called NIN.TI ("lady-life").

Some scholars read in Adapa (the "model man" of Enki) the biblical Adama, or Adam.

The double meaning of the Sumerian TI also raises biblical parallels. For ti could mean both "life" and "rib," so that Ninti's name meant both 'lady of life" and "lady of the rib." The biblical Eve - whose name meant "life" was created out of Adam's rib, so Eve, too, was in a way a "lady of life" and a "lady of the rib."

As giver of life to gods and Man alike, Ninhursag was spoken of as the Mother Goddess.

She was nicknamed "Mammu" - the forerunner of our "mom" or "mamma" - and her symbol was the "cutter" - the tool used in antiquity by midwives to cut the umbilical cord after birth.

Enlil, Enki's brother and rival, did have the good fortune to achieve such a "rightful heir" by his sister Ninhursag. The youngest of the gods upon Earth who were born in the heavens, his name was NIN.UR.TA ('lord who completes the foundation").

He was,

"the heroic son of Enlil who went forth with net and rays of light" to battle for his father; "the avenging son... who launched bolts of light."

His spouse BA.U was also a nurse or a doctor; her epithet was "lady who the dead brings back to life."

The ancient portraits of Ninurta showed him holding a unique weapon - no doubt the very one that could shoot "bolts of light."

The ancient texts hailed him as a mighty hunter, a fighting god renowned for his martial abilities. But his greatest heroic fight was not in behalf of his father but for his own sake. It was a wide-ranging battle with an evil god named ZU ("wise"), and it involved no less a prize than the leadership of the gods on Earth; for Zu had illegally captured the insignia and objects Enlil had held as Chief of the Gods.

The texts describing these events are broken at the beginning, and the story becomes legible only from the point when Zu arrives at the E-Kur, the temple of Enlil. He is apparently known, and of some rank, for Enlil welcomes him,

"entrusting to him the guarding of the entrance to his shrine."

But the "evil Zu" was to repay trust with betrayal, for it was "the removal of the Enlilship" - the seizing of the divine powers - that "he conceived in his heart."

To do so, Zu had to take possession of certain objects, including the magical Tablet of Destinies.

The wily Zu seized his opportunity when Enlil undressed and went into the pool for his daily swim, leaving his paraphernalia unattended.

At the entrance of the sanctuary,

which he had been viewing,

Zu awaits the start of day.

As Enlil was washing with pure water -

his crown having been removed

and deposited on the throne -

Zu seized the Tablet of Destinies in his hands,

took away the Enlilship.

As Zu fled in his MU (translated "name," but indicating a flying machine) to a faraway hideaway, the consequences of his bold act were beginning to take effect.

Suspended were the Divine Formulas;

Stillness spread all over; silence prevailed....

The Sanctuary's brilliance was taken off.

"Father Enlil was speechless."

"The gods of the land gathered one by one at the news."

The matter was so grave that even Anu was informed at his Heavenly Abode.

He reviewed the situation and concluded that Zu must be apprehended so that the "formulas" could be restored.

Turning "to the gods, his children," Anu asked,

"Which of the gods will smite Zu? His name shall be greatest of all!"

Several gods known for their valor were called in. But they all pointed out that having taken the Tablet of Destinies, Zu now possessed the same powers as Enlil, so that "he who opposes him becomes like clay."

At this point, Ea had a great idea: Why not call upon Ninurta to take up the hopeless fight?

The assembled gods could not have missed Ea's ingenious mischief. Clearly, the chances of the succession falling to his own offspring stood to increase if Zu were defeated; likewise, he could benefit if Ninurta were killed in the process. To the amazement of the gods, Ninhursag (in this text called NIN.MAH - "great lady"), agreed.

Turning to her son Ninurta, she explained to him that Zu robbed not only Enlil but Ninurta, too, of the Enlilship. "With shrieks of pain I gave birth," she shouted, and it was she who "made certain for my brother and for Anu" the continued "Kingship of Heaven."

So that her pains not be in vain, she instructed Ninurta to go out and fight to win:

Launch thy offensive... capture the fugitive Zu....

Let thy terrifying offensive rage against him....

Slit his throat! Vanquish Zu!...

Let thy seven ill Winds go against him....

Cause the entire Whirlwind to attack him....

Let thy Radiance go against him....

Let thy Winds carry his Wings to a secret place....

Let sovereignty return to Ekur;

Let the Divine Formulas return

to the father who begot thee.

The various versions of the epic then provide thrilling descriptions of the battle that ensued.

Ninurta shot "arrows" at Zu, but "the arrows could not approach Zu's body... while he bore the Tablet of Destinies of the gods in his hand." The launched "weapons were stopped in the midst" of their flight. As the inconclusive battle wore on, Ea advised Ninurta to add a til-lum to his weapons, and shoot it into the "pinions," or small cog-wheels, of Zu's "wings."

Following this advice, and shouting "Wing to wing," Ninurta shot the til-lum at Zu's pinions. Thus hit, the pinions began to scatter, and the "wings" of Zu fell in a swirl. Zu was vanquished, and the Tablets of Destiny returned to Enlil.

Who was Zu? Was he, as some scholars hold, a "mythological bird"?

Evidently he could fly. But so can any man today who takes a plane, or any astronaut who goes up in a spaceship. Ninurta, too, could fly, as skillfully as Zu (and perhaps better). But he himself was not a bird of any kind, as his many depictions, by himself or with his consort BA.U (also called GU.LA), make abundantly clear. Rather, he did his flying with the aid of a remarkable "bird," which was kept at his sacred precinct (the GIR.SU) in the city of Lagash.

Nor was Zu a "bird"; apparently he had at his disposal a "bird" in which he could fly away into hiding. It was from within such "birds" that the sky battle took place between the two gods. And there can be no doubt regarding the nature of the weapon that finally smote Zu's "bird."

Called TIL in Sumerian and til-lum in Assyrian, it was written pictorially thus: >----------- , and it must have meant then what til means nowadays in Hebrew: "missile."

Zu, then, was a god - one of the gods who had reason to scheme at usurpation of the Enlilship; a god whom Ninurta, as the legitimate successor, had every reason to fight.

Was he perhaps MAR.DUK ("son of the pure mound"), Enki's firstborn by his wife DAM.KI.NA, impatient to seize by a ruse what was not legally his?

There is reason to believe that, having failed to achieve a son by his sister and thus produce a legal contender for the Enlilship, Enki relied on his son Marduk. Indeed, when the ancient Near East was seized with great social and military upheavals at the beginning of the second millennium B.C., Marduk was elevated in Babylon to the status of national god of Sumer and Akkad.

Marduk was proclaimed King of the Gods, replacing Enlil, and the other gods were required to pledge allegiance to him and to come to reside in Babylon, where their activities could easily be supervised.

This usurpation of the Enlilship (long after the incident with Zu) was accompanied by an extensive Babylonian effort to forge the ancient texts.

The most important texts were rewritten and altered so as to make Marduk appear as the Lord of Heavens, the Creator, the Benefactor, the Hero, instead of Anu or Enlil or even Ninurta. Among the texts altered was the "Tale of Zu"; and according to the Babylonian version it was Marduk (not Ninurta) who fought Zu. In this version, Marduk boasted: "Mahasti moh il Zu" ("I have crushed the skull of the god Zu").

Clearly, then, Zu could not have been Marduk.

Nor would it stand to reason that Enki, "God of Sciences," would have coached Ninurta regarding the choice and use of the successful weapons against his own son Marduk. Enki, to judge by his behavior as well as by his urging Ninurta to "cut the throat of Zu," expected to gain from the fight, no matter who lost. The only logical conclusion is that Zu, too, was in some way a legal contender to the Enlilship.

This suggests only one god: Nanna, the firstborn of Enlil by his official consort Ninlil. For if Ninurta were eliminated, Nanna would be in the unobstructed line of succession.

Nanna (short for NAN.NAR - "bright one") has come down to us through the ages better known by his Akkadian (or "Semitic") name Sin.

As firstborn of Enlil, he was granted sovereignty over Sumer's best-known city-state, UR ("The City"). His temple there was called E.GISH.NU.GAL ("house of the seed of the throne"). From that abode, Nanna and his consort NIN.GAL ("great lady") conducted the affairs of the city and its people with great benevolence. The people of Ur reciprocated with great affection for their divine rulers, lovingly calling their god "Father Nanna" and other affectionate nicknames.

The prosperity of Ur was attributed by its people directly to Nanna. Shulgi, a ruler of Ur (by the god's grace) at the end of the third millennium B.C., described the "house" of Nanna as "a great stall filled with abundance," a "bountiful place of bread offerings," where sheep multiplied and oxen were slaughtered, a place of sweet music where the drum and timbrel sounded.

Under the administration of its god-protector Nanna, Ur became the granary of Sumer, the supplier of grains as well as of sheep and cattle to other temples elsewhere.

A "Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur" informs us, in a negative way, of what Ur was like before its demise:

In the granaries of Nanna there was no grain.

The evening meals of the gods were suppressed;

in their great dining halls, wine and honey ended....

In his temple's lofty oven, oxen and sheep are not prepared;

The hum has ceased at Nanna's great Place of

Shackles:

that house where commands for the ox were shouted -

its silence is overwhelming…

Its grinding mortar and pestle lie inert…

The offering boats carried no offerings…

Did not bring offering bread to Enlil in Nippur.

Ur's river is empty, no barge moves on it…

No foot trods its banks; long grasses grow there.

Another lamentation, bewailing the "sheepfolds that have been delivered to the wind," the abandoned stables, the shepherds and herdsmen that were gone, is most unusual: It was not written by the people of Ur, but by the god Nanna and his spouse Ningal themselves.

These and other lamentations over the fall of Ur disclose the trauma of some unusual event. The Sumerian texts inform us that Nanna and Ningal left the city before its demise became complete. It was a hasty departure, touchingly described.

Nanna, who loved his city,

departed from the city. Sin, who loved Ur,

no longer stayed in his House. Ningal...

fleeing her city through enemy territory, hastily put on a garment,

departed from her House.

The fall of Ur and the exile of its gods have been depicted in the lamentations as the results of a deliberate decision by Anu and Enlil. It was to the two of them that Nanna appealed to call off the punishment.

May Anu, the king of the gods,

utter: "It is enough"; May Enlil, the king of the lands,

decree a favorable fate!

Appealing directly to Enlil, "Sin brought his suffering heart to his father; curtsied before Enlil, the father who begot him," and begged him:

O my father who begot me,

Until when will you look inimically

upon my atonement?

Until when? ...

On the oppressed heart that you have made

flicker like a flame -

please cast a friendly eye.

Nowhere do the lamentations disclose the cause of Anu's and Enlil's wrath. But if Nanna were Zu, the punishment would have justified his crime of usurpation. Was he Zu?

He certainly could have been Zu because Zu was in possession of some kind of flying machine - the "bird" in which he escaped and from which he fought Ninurta. Sumerian psalms spoke in adoration of his "Boat of Heaven."

Father Nannar, Lord of Ur...

Whose glory in the sacred Boat of Heaven is ...

Lord, firstborn son of Enlil.

When in the Boat of Heaven thou ascendeth,

Thou art glorious.

Enlil hath adorned thy hand

With a scepter everlasting

When over Ur in the Sacred Boat thou mountest.

There is additional evidence. Nanna's other name, Sin, derived from SU.EN, which was another way of pronouncing ZU.EN.

The same complex meaning of a two-syllable word could be obtained by placing the syllables in any order: ZU.EN and EN.ZU were "mirror" words of each other. Nanna/Sin as ZU.EN was none other than EN.ZU ("lord Zu"). It was he, we must conclude, who tried to seize the Enlilship.

We can now understand why, in spite of Ea's suggestion, the lord Zu (Sin) was punished, not by execution, but by exile. Both Sumerian texts, as well as archaeological evidence, indicate that Sin and his spouse fled to Haran, the Human city protected by several rivers and mountainous terrain. It is noteworthy that when Abraham's clan, led by his father Terah, left Ur, they also set their course to Haran, where they stayed for many years en route to the Promised Land.

Though Ur remained for all time a city dedicated to Nanna/Sin, Haran must have been his residence for a very long time, for it was made to resemble Ur - its temples, buildings, and streets - almost exactly.

Andre Parrot (Abraham et son temps) sums up the similarities by saying that,

"there is every evidence that the cult of Harran was nothing but an exact replica of that of Ur."

When the temple of Sin at Haran - built and rebuilt over the millennia - was uncovered during excavations that lasted more than fifty years, the finds included two stelae (memorial stone pillars) on which a unique record was inscribed.

It was a record dictated by Adadguppi, a high priestess of Sin, of how she prayed and planned for the return of Sin, for, at some unknown prior time,

Sin, the king of all the gods,

became angry with his city and his temple,

and went up to Heaven.

That Sin, disgusted or despairing, just "packed up" and "went up to Heaven" is corroborated by other inscriptions.

These tell us that the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal retrieved from certain enemies a sacred "cylinder seal of the costliest jasper" and "had it improved by drawing upon it a picture of Sin." He further inscribed upon the sacred stone "a eulogy of Sin, and hung it around the neck of the image of Sin."

That stone seal of Sin must have been a relic of olden times, for it is further stated that,

"it is the one whose face had been damaged in those days, during the destruction wrought by the enemy."

The high priestess, who was born during the reign of Ashurbanipal, is assumed to have been of royal blood herself.

In her appeals to Sin, she proposed a practical "deal": the restoration of his powers over his adversaries in return for helping her son Nabunaid become ruler of Sumer and Akkad. Historical records confirm that in the year 555 B.C. Nabunaid, then commander of the Babylonian armies, was named by his fellow officers to the throne.

In this he was stated to have been directly helped by Sin. It was, the inscriptions by Nabunaid inform us, "on the first day of his appearance" that Sin, using "the weapon of Ami" - was able to "touch with a beam of light" the skies and crush the enemies down on Earth below.

Nabunaid kept his mother's promise to the god. He rebuilt Sin's temple E.HUL.HUL ("house of great joy") and declared Sin to be Supreme God. It was then that Sin was able to grasp in his hands,

"the power of the Anu-office, wield all the power of the Enlil-office, take over the power of the Ea-office - holding thus in his own hand all the Heavenly Powers."

Thus defeating the usurper Marduk, even capturing the powers of Marduk's father Ea, Sin assumed the title of "Divine Crescent" and established his reputation as the so-called Moon God.

How could Sin, reported to have gone back to Heaven in disgust, have been able to perform such feats back on Earth? Nabunaid, confirming that Sin had indeed "forgotten his angry command... and decided to return to the temple Ehulhul," claimed a miracle.

A miracle "that has not happened to the Land since the days of old" had taken place: A deity "has come down from Heaven."

This is the great miracle of Sin,

That has not happened to the Land

Since the days of old;

That the people of the Land

Have not seen, nor had written

On clay tablets, to preserve forever:

That Sin,

Lord of all the gods and goddesses,

Residing in Heaven,

Has come down from Heaven.

Regrettably, no details are provided of the place and manner in which Sin landed back on Earth.

But we do know that it was in the fields outside of Haran that Jacob, on his way from Canaan to find himself a bride in the "old country," saw "a ladder set up on the earth and its top reaching heavenward, and there were angels of the Lord ascending and descending by it."

At the same time that Nabunaid restored the powers and temples of Nanna/Sin, he also restored the temples and worship of Sin's twin children, IN.ANNA ("Ami's lady") and UTU ("the shining one").

The two were born to Sin by his official spouse Ningal, and were thus by birth members of the Divine Dynasty. Inanna was technically the firstborn, but her twin brother Utu was the firstborn son, and thus the legal dynastic heir. Unlike the rivalry that existed in the similar instance of Esau and Jacob, the two divine children grew up very close to each other. They shared experiences and adventures, came to each other's aid, and when Inanna had to choose a husband from one of two gods, she turned to her brother for advice.

Inanna and Utu were born in time immemorial, when only the gods inhabited Earth. Utu's city-domain Sippar was listed among the very first cities to have been established by the gods in Sumer.

Nabunaid stated in an inscription that when he undertook to rebuild Utu's temple E.BABBARA ("shining house") in Sippar:

I sought out its ancient foundation-platform,

and I went down eighteen cubits into the soil.

Utu, the Great Lord of Ebabbara...

Showed me personally the foundation-platform

of Naram-Sin, son of Sargon, which for 3,200 years

no king preceding me had seen.

When civilization blossomed in Sumer, and Man joined the gods in the Land Between the Rivers, Utu became associated primarily with law and justice.

Several early law codes, apart from invoking Anu and Enlil, were also presented as requiring acceptance and adherence because they were promulgated "in accordance with the true word of Utu."

The Babylonian king Hammurabi inscribed his law code on a stela, at the top of which the king is depicted receiving the laws from the god.

Tablets uncovered at Sippar attest to its reputation in ancient times as a place of just and fair laws. Some texts depict Utu himself as sitting in judgment on gods and men alike; Sippar was, in fact, the seat of Sumer's "supreme court."

The justice advocated by Utu is reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount recorded in the New Testament.

A "wisdom tablet" suggested the following behavior to please Utu:

Unto your opponent do no evil;

Your evildoer recompense with good.

Unto your enemy, let justice be done. ...

Let not your heart be induced to do evil....

To the one begging for alms -

give food to eat, give wine to drink....

Be helpful; do good.

Because he assured justice and prevented oppression - and perhaps for other reasons, too, as we shall see later on - Utu was considered the protector of travelers.

Yet the most common and lasting epithets applied to Utu concerned his brilliance. From earliest times, he was called Babbar ("shining one"). He was "Utu, who sheds a wide light," the one who "lights up Heaven and Earth."

Hammurabi, in his inscription, called the god by his Akkadian name, Shamash, which in Semitic languages means "Sun." It has therefore been assumed by the scholars that Utu/Shamash was the Mesopotamian Sun God. We shall show, as we proceed, that while this god was assigned the Sun as his celestial counterpart, there was another aspect to the statements that he "shed a bright light" when he performed the special tasks assigned to him by his grandfather Enlil.

Just as the law codes and the court records are human testimonials to the actual presence among the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia of a deity named Utu/Shamash, so there exist endless inscriptions, texts, incantations, oracles, prayers, and depictions attesting to the physical presence and existence of the goddess Inanna, whose Akkadian name was Ishtar.

A Mesopotamian king in the thirteenth century B.C. stated that he had rebuilt her temple in her brother's city of Sippar, on foundations that were eight hundred years old in his time. But in her central city, Uruk, tales of her went back to olden times.

Known to the Romans as Venus, to the Greeks as Aphrodite, to the Canaanites and the Hebrews as Astarte, to the Assyrians and Babylonians and Hittites and the other ancient peoples as Ishtar or Eshdar, to the Akkadians and the Sumerians as Inanna or Innin or Ninni, or by others of her many nicknames and epithets, she was at all times the Goddess of Warfare and the Goddess of Love, a fierce, beautiful female who, though only a great-granddaughter of Anu, carved for herself, by herself, a major place among the Great Gods of Heaven and Earth.

As a young goddess she was, apparently, assigned a domain in a far land east of Sumer, the Land of Aratta. It was there that "the lofty one, Inanna, queen of all the land," had her "house."

But Inanna had greater ambitions. In the city of Uruk there stood the great temple of Anu, occupied only during his occasional state visits to Earth; and Inanna set her eyes on this seat of power.

Sumerian king lists state that the first non-divine ruler of Uruk was Meshkiaggasher, a son of the god Utu by a human mother. He was followed by his son Enmerkar, a great Sumerian king. Inanna, then, was the great-aunt of Enmerkar; and she found little difficulty in persuading him that she should really be the goddess of Uruk, rather than of the remote Aratta.

A long and fascinating text named "Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta" describes how Enmerkar sent emissaries to Aratta, using every possible argument in a "war of nerves" to force Aratta to submit because "the lord Enmerkar who is the servant of Inanna made her queen of the House of Anu." The epic's unclear end hints at a happy ending: While Inanna moved to Uruk, she did not "abandon her House in Aratta."

That she might have become a "commuting goddess" is not so improbable, for Inanna/Ishtar was known from other texts as an adventurous traveler.

Her occupation of Anu's temple in Uruk could not have taken place without his knowledge and consent; and the texts give us strong clues as to how such consent was obtained. Soon Inanna was known as "Anunitum," a nickname meaning "beloved of Anu." She was referred to in texts as "the holy mistress of Anu"; and it follows that Inanna shared not only Anu's temple but also his bed - whenever he came to Uruk, or on the reported occasions of her going up to his Heavenly Abode.

Having thus maneuvered herself into the position of goddess of Uruk and mistress of the temple of Anu, Ishtar proceeded to use trickery for enhancing Uruk's standing and her own powers.

Farther down the Euphrates stood the ancient city of Eridu - Enki's center. Knowing of his great knowledge of all the arts and sciences of civilization, Inanna resolved to beg, borrow, or steal these secrets. Obviously intending to use her "personal charms" on Enki (her great-uncle), Inanna arranged to call on him alone.

That fact was not unnoticed by Enki, who instructed his housemaster to prepare dinner for two.

Come my housemaster Isimud,

hear my instructions;

a word I shall say to you,

heed my words:

The maiden,

all alone,

has directed her step to the Abzu...

Have the maiden enter the Abzu of Eridu,

Give her to eat barley cakes with butter,

Pour for her cold water that freshens the heart,

Give her to drink beer ...

Happy and drunk, Enki was ready to do anything for Inanna.

She boldly asked for the divine formulas, which were the basis of a high civilization. Enki granted her some one hundred of them, including divine formulas pertaining to supreme lordship, Kingship, priestly functions, weapons, legal procedures, scribeship, woodworking, even the knowledge of musical instruments and of temple prostitution.

By the time Enki awoke and realized what he had done, Inanna was already well on her way to Uruk. Enki ordered after her his "awesome weapons," but to no avail, for Inanna had sped to Uruk in her "Boat of Heaven."

Quite frequently, Ishtar was depicted as a naked goddess; flaunting her beauty, she was sometimes even depicted raising her skirts to reveal the lower parts of her body.

Gilgamesh, a ruler of Uruk circa 2900 B.C. who was also partly divine (having been born to a human father and a goddess), reported how Inanna enticed him - even after she already had an official spouse.

Having washed himself after a battle and put on "a fringe cloak, fastened with a sash,"

Glorious Ishtar raised an eye at his beauty.

"Come, Gilgamesh, be thou my lover!

Come, grant me your fruit.

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

But Gilgamesh knew the score.

"Which of thy lovers didst thou love forever?" he asked. "Which of thy shepherds pleased thee for all time?"

Reciting a long list of her love affairs, he refused.

As time went on - as she assumed higher ranks in the pantheon, and with it the responsibility for affairs of state - Inanna/Ishtar began to display more martial qualities, and was often depicted as a Goddess of War, armed to the teeth.

The inscriptions left by Assyrian kings describe how they went to war for her and upon her command, how she directly advised when to wait and when to attack, how she sometimes marched at the head of the armies, and how, on at least one occasion, she granted a theophany and appeared before all the troops.

In return for their loyalty, she promised the Assyrian kings long life and success.

"From a Golden Chamber in the skies I will watch over thee," she assured them.

Was she turned into a bitter warrior because she, too, came upon hard times with the rise of Marduk to supremacy?

In one of his inscriptions Nabunaid said:

"Inanna of Uruk, the exalted princess who dwelt in a gold cella, who rode upon a chariot to which were harnessed seven lions - the inhabitants of Uruk changed her cult during the rule of king Erba-Marduk, removed her cella and unharnessed her team."

Inanna, reported Nabunaid, "had therefore left the E-Anna angrily, and stayed hence in an unseemly place" (which he does not name). (Fig 54)

Seeking, perhaps, to combine love with power, the much-courted Inanna chose as her husband DU.MU.ZI, a younger son of Enki.

Many ancient texts deal with the loves and quarrels of the two. Some are love songs of great beauty and vivid sexuality. Others tell how Ishtar - back from one of her journeys - found Dumuzi celebrating her absence. She arranged for his capture and disappearance into the Lower World - a domain ruled by her sister E.RESH.KI.GAL and her consort NER.GAL. Some of the most celebrated Sumerian and Akkadian texts deal with the journey of Ishtar to the Lower World in search of her banished beloved.

Of the six known sons of Enki, three have been featured in Sumerian tales:

• • the firstborn Marduk, who eventually usurped the supremacy

  • Nergal, who became ruler of the Lower World

  • Dumuzi, who married Inanna/Ishtar

Enlil, too, had three sons who played key roles in both divine and human affairs:

• • Ninurta, who, having been born to Enlil by his sister Ninhursag, was the legal successor

  • Nanna/Sin, firstborn by Enlil's official spouse Ninlil

  • a younger son by Ninlil named ISH.KUR ("mountainous," "far mountain land"), who was more frequently called Adad ("beloved")

As brother of Sin and uncle of Utu and Inanna, Adad appears to have felt more at home with them than at his own house.

The Sumerian texts constantly grouped the four together. The ceremonies connected with the visit of Anu to Uruk also spoke of the four as a group. One text, describing the entrance to the court of Anu, states that the throne room was reached through "the gate of Sin, Shamash, Adad, and Ishtar." Another text, first published by V. K. Shileiko (Russian Academy of the History of Material Cultures) poetically described the four as retiring for the night together.

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

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

It is noteworthy that in the biblical Song of Songs, the playful girl calls her lover dod - a word that means both "lover" and "uncle." Now, was Ishkur called Adad - a derivative from the Sumerian DA.DA - because he was the uncle who was the lover?

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

As such he was revered as the Hurrian/Hittite Teshub and the Urartian Teshubu ("wind blower"), the Amorite Ramanu ("thunderer"), the Canaanite Ragimu ("caster of hailstones"), the Indo-European Buriash ("light maker"), the Semitic Meir ("he who lights up" the skies).

A god list kept at the British Museum, as shown by Hans Schlobies (Der Akkadwche Wettergott in Mesopotamen), clarifies that Ishkur was indeed the divine lord in lands far from Sumer and Akkad.

As Sumerian texts reveal, this was no accident. Enlil, it seems, willfully dispatched his young son to become the "Resident Deity" in the mountain lands north and west of Mesopotamia.

Why did Enlil dispatch his youngest and beloved son away from Nippur?

Several Sumerian epic tales have been found about the arguments and even bloody struggles among the younger gods. Many cylinder seals depict scenes of god battling god; it would seem that the original rivalry between Enki and Enlil was carried on and intensified between their sons, with brother sometimes turning against brother - a divine tale of Cain and Abel. Some of these battles were against a deity identified as Kur - in all probability, Ishkur/Adad.

This may well explain why Enlil deemed it advisable to grant his younger son a far-off domain, to keep him out of the dangerous battles for the succession.

The position of the sons of Anu, Enlil, and Enki, and of their offspring, in the dynastic lineage emerges clearly through a unique Sumerian device: the allocation of numerical rank to certain gods.

The discovery of this system also brings out the membership in the Great Circle of Gods of Heaven and Earth when Sumerian civilization blossomed. We shall find that this Supreme Pantheon was made up of twelve deities.

The first hint that a cryptographic number system was applied to the Great Gods came with the discovery that the names of the gods Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar were sometimes substituted in the texts by the numbers 30, 20, and 15, respectively.

The highest unit of the Sumerian sexagesimal system - 60 - was assigned to Anu; Enlil "was" 50; Enki, 40; and Adad, 10. The number 10 and its six multiples within the prime number 60 were thus assigned to male deities, and it would appear plausible that the numbers ending with 5 were assigned to the female deities.

From this, the following cryptographic table emerges:

Male

60 - Anu

50 - Enlil

40 - Ea/Enki

30 - Nanna/Sin

20 - Utu/Shamash

10 - Ishkur/Adad

6 male deities

Female

55 - Antu

4.5 - Ninlil

35 - Ninki

25 - Ningal

15 - Inanna/Ishtar

5 - Ninhursag

6 female deities

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

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

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

But only twelve made the Great Circle.

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THE NEFILIM - PEOPLE OF THE FIERY ROCKETS

SUMERIAN AND AKKADIAN texts leave no doubt that the peoples of the ancient Near East were certain that the Gods of Heaven and Earth were able to rise from Earth and ascend into the heavens, as well as roam Earth's skies at will.

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

One day my Queen,

After crossing heaven, crossing earth -

Inanna,

After crossing heaven, crossing earth -

After crossing Elam and Shubur,

After crossing...

The hierodule approached weary, fell asleep.

I saw her from the edge of my garden;

Kissed her, copulated with her.

Inanna, here described as roaming the heavens over many lands that lie far apart - feats possible only by flying - herself spoke on another occasion of her flying.

In a text which S. Langdon (in Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale) named "A Classical Liturgy to Innini," the goddess laments her expulsion from her city. Acting on the instructions of Enlil, an emissary, who "brought to me the word of Heaven," entered her throne room, "his unwashed hands put on me," and, after other indignities,

Me, from my temple,

they caused to fly;

A Queen am I whom, from my city,

like a bird they caused to fly.

Such a capability, by Inanna as well as the other major gods, was often indicated by the ancient artists by depicting the gods - anthropomorphic in all other respects, as we have seen - with wings.

The wings, as can be seen from numerous depictions, were not part of the body - not natural wings - but rather a decorative attachment to the god's clothing.

Inanna/Ishtar, whose far-flung travels are mentioned in many ancient texts, commuted between her initial distant domain in Aratta and her coveted abode in Uruk. She called upon Enki in Eridu and Enlil in Nippur, and visited

her brother Utu at his headquarters in Sippar. But her most celebrated journey was to the Lower World, the domain of her sister Ereshkigal.

The journey was the subject not only of epic tales but also of artistic depictions on cylinder seals - the latter showing the goddess with wings, to stress the fact that she flew over from Sumer to the Lower World.

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

Seven such objects are also mentioned in other texts dealing with Inanna's skyborne travels:

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

2. "Measuring pendants," on her ears.

3. Chains of small blue stones, around her neck.

4. Twin "stones," on her shoulders.

5. A golden cylinder, in her hands.

6. Straps, clasping her breast.

7. The PALA garment, clothed around her body.

Though no one has as yet been able to explain the nature and significance of these seven objects, we feel that the answer has long been available.

Excavating the Assyrian capital Assur from 1903 to 1914, Walter Andrae and his colleagues found in the Temple of Ishtar a battered statue of the goddess showing her with various "contraptions" attached to her chest and back.

In 1934 archaeologists excavating at Mari came upon a similar but intact statue buried in the ground. It was a life-size likeness of a beautiful woman. Her unusual headdress was adorned with a pair of horns, indicating that she was a goddess. Standing around the 4,000-year-old statue, the archaeologists were thrilled by her lifelike appearance (in a snapshot, one can hardly distinguish between the statue and the living men).

They named her The Goddess with a Vase because she was holding a cylindrical object.

Unlike the flat carvings or bas-reliefs, this life-size, three-dimensional representation of the goddess reveals interesting features about her attire.

On her head she wears not a milliner's chapeau but a special helmet; protruding from it on both sides and fitted over the ears are objects that remind one of a pilot's earphones. On her neck and upper chest the goddess wears a necklace of many small (and probably precious) stones; in her hands she holds a cylindrical object which appears too thick and heavy to be a vase for holding water.

Over a blouse of see-through material, two parallel straps run across her chest, leading back to and holding in place an unusual box of rectangular shape. The box is held tight against the back of the goddess's neck and is firmly attached to the helmet with a horizontal strap.

Whatever the box held inside must have been heavy, for the contraption is further supported by two large shoulder pads. The weight of the box is increased by a hose that is connected to its base by a circular clasp. The complete package of instruments - for this is what they undoubtedly were - is held in place with the aid of the two sets of straps that crisscross the goddess's back and chest.

The parallel between the seven objects required by Inanna for her aerial journeys and the dress and objects worn by the statue from Mari (and probably also the mutilated one found at Ishtar's temple in Ashur) is easily proved.

We see the "measuring pendants" - the earphones - on her ears; the rows or "chains" of small stones around her neck; the "twin stones" - the two shoulder pads - on her shoulders; the "golden cylinder" in her hands, and the clasping straps that crisscross her breast.

She is indeed clothed in a "PALA garment" ("ruler's garment"), and on her head she wears the SHU.GAR.RA helmet - a term that literally means "that which makes go far into universe."

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

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

The biblical account of the events preceding the destruction of the two sinful cities illustrates the fact that these emissaries were, on the one hand, anthropomorphic in all respects, and, on the other hand, they could be identified as "angels" as soon as they were observed. We learn that their appearance was sudden.

Abraham,

"raised his eyes and, lo and behold, there were three men standing by him."

Bowing and calling them "My Lords," he pleaded with them,

"Do not pass over thy servant," and prevailed on them to wash their feet, rest, and eat.

Having done as Abraham had requested, two of the angels (the third "man" turned out to be the Lord himself) then proceeded to Sodom.

Lot, the nephew of Abraham,

"was sitting at the gate of Sodom; and when he saw them he rose up to meet them and bowed to the ground, and said: If it pleases my Lords, pray come to the house of thy servant and wash your feet and sleep over-night."

Then "he made for them a feast, and they ate." When the news of the arrival of the two spread in the town, "all the town's people, young and old, surrounded the house, and called out to Lot and said: Where are the men who came this night unto thee?"

How were these men - who ate, drank, slept, and washed their tired feet - nevertheless so instantly recognizable as angels of the Lord?

The only plausible explanation is that what they wore - their helmets or uniforms - or what they carried - their weapons - made them immediately recognizable. That they carried distinctive weapons is certainly a possibility.

The two "men" at Sodom, about to be lynched by the crowd,

"smote the people at the entrance of the house with blindness... and they were unable to find the doorway."

And another angel, this time appearing to Gideon, as he was chosen to be a Judge in Israel, gave him a divine sign by touching a rock with his baton, whereupon a fire jumped out of the rock.

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

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

Clay figurines found at Sumerian sites and believed to be some 5,500 years old may well be crude representations of such malachim holding wandlike weapons. In one instance the face is seen through a helmet's visor.

In the other instance, the "emissary" wears the distinct divine conical headdress and a uniform studded with circular objects of unknown function.

The eye slots or "goggles" of the figurines are a most interesting feature because the Near East in the fourth millennium B.C. was literally swamped with wafer-like figurines that depicted in a stylized manner the upper part of the deities, exaggerating their most prominent feature: a conical helmet with elliptical visors or goggles.

A hoard of such figurines was found at Tell Brak, a prehistoric site on the Khabur River, the river on whose banks Ezekiel saw the divine chariot millennia later.

It is undoubtedly no mere coincidence that the Hittites, linked to Sumer and Akkad via the Khabur area, adopted as their written sign for "gods" the symbol 

 clearly borrowed from the "eye" figurines. 

It is also no wonder that this symbol or hieroglyph for "divine being," expressed in artistic styles, came to dominate the art not only of Asia Minor but also of the early Greeks during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods.

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

Speaking of her occasional visits to Anu at his Celestial Abode, Inanna herself explained that she could undertake such journeys because "Enlil himself fastened the divine ME-attire about my body."

The text quoted Enlil as saying to her:

You have lifted the ME,

You have tied the ME to your hands,

You have gathered the ME,

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

O Queen of all the ME, O radiant light

Who with her hand grasps the seven ME.

An early Sumerian ruler invited by the gods to ascend to the heavens was named EN.ME.DUR.AN.KI, which literally meant "ruler whose me connect Heaven and Earth."

An inscription by Nebuchadnezzar II, describing the reconstruction of a special pavilion for Marduk's "celestial chariot," states that it was part of the,

"fortified house of the seven me of Heaven and Earth."

The scholars refer to the me as "divine power objects."

Literally, the term stems from the concept of "swimming in celestial waters." Inanna described them as parts of the "celestial garment" that she put on for her journeys in the Boat of Heaven. The me were thus parts of the special gear worn for flying in Earth's skies as well as into outer space.

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

The Old Testament informs us that the patriarch Jacob, spending the night in a field outside of Haran, saw "a ladder down. The Lord himself stood at the top of the ladder. And the astounded Jacob "was fearful, and he said":

Indeed, a God is present in this place,

and I knew it not...

How awesome is this place!

Indeed, this is none but the Lord's Abode

and this is the Gateway to Heaven.

There are two interesting points in this tale.

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

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

The Old Testament also reports that the prophet Elijah did not die on Earth, but "went up into Heaven by a Whirlwind." This was not a sudden and unexpected event: The ascent of Elijah to the heavens was prearranged. He was told to go to Beth-El ("the lord's house") on a specific day. Rumors had already spread among his disciples that he was about to be taken up to the heavens.

When they queried his deputy whether the rumor was true, he confirmed that, indeed,

"the Lord will take away the Master today."

And then:

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

Even more celebrated, and certainly better described, was the heavenly chariot seen by the prophet Ezekiel, who dwelt among the Judaean deportees on the banks of the Khabur River in northern Mesopotamia.

The Heavens were opened,

and I saw the appearances of the Lord.

What Ezekiel saw was a Manlike being, surrounded by brilliance and brightness, sitting on a throne that rested on a metal "firmament" within the chariot.

The vehicle itself, which could move whichever way upon wheels-within-wheels and rise off the ground vertically, was described by the prophet as a glowing whirlwind.

And I saw

a Whirlwind coming from the north,

as a great cloud with flashes of fire

and brilliance all around it.

And within it, from within the fire,

there was a radiance like a glowing halo.

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

About two millennia earlier, when the Sumerian ruler Gudea commemorated his building the temple for his god Ninurta, he wrote that there appeared to him,

"a man that shone like Heaven... by the helmet on his head, he was a god."

When Ninurta and two divine companions appeared to Gudea, they were standing beside Ninurta's "divine black wind bird." As it turned out, the main purpose of the temple's construction was to provide a secure zone, an inner special enclosure within the temple grounds, for this "divine bird."

The construction of this enclosure, Gudea reported, required huge beams and massive stones imported from afar. Only when the "divine bird" was placed within the enclosure was the construction of the temple deemed completed. And, once in place, the "divine bird" "could lay hold on -heaven" and was capable of "bringing together Heaven and Earth."

The object was so important - "sacred" - that it was constantly protected by two "divine weapons," the "supreme hunter" and the "supreme killer" - weapons that emitted beams of light and death-dealing rays.

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

Enigmatic murals uncovered at Tell Ghassul, a site east of the Dead Sea whose ancient name is unknown, may shed light on our subject.

Dating to circa 3500 B.C., the murals depict a large eight-pointed "compass," the head of a helmeted person within a bell-shaped chamber, and two designs of mechanical craft that could well have been the "whirlwinds" of antiquity.

The ancient texts also describe some vehicle used to lift aeronauts into the skies.

Gudea stated that, as the "divine bird" rose to circle the lands, it "flashed upon the raised bricks." The protected enclosure was described as MU.NA.DA.TUIiTUR ("strong stone resting place of the MU"). Urukagina, who ruled in Lagash, said in regard to the "divine black wind bird":

"The MU that lights up as a fire I made high and strong."

Similarly, Lu-Utu, who ruled in Umma in the third millennium B.C., constructed a place for a mu,

"which in a fire comes forth," for the god Utu, "in the appointed place within his temple."

The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, recording his rebuilding of Marduk's sacred precinct, said that within fortified walls made of burned brick and gleaming onyx marble:

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

the Chariot of Marduk's princeliness;

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

the supreme traveler between Heaven and Earth,

in the midst of the pavilion I enclosed,

screening off its sides.

ID.GE.UL, the first epithet employed to describe this "supreme traveler," or "Chariot of Marduk," literally means "high to heaven, bright at night."

ZAG.MU.KU, the second epithet describing the vehicle - clearly a "boat" nesting in a special pavilion - means "the bright MU which is for afar."

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

The coin depicts a two-part temple. In front stands the main temple structure, imposing with its columned gateway. Behind it is an inner courtyard, or "sacred area," hidden and protected by a high, massive wall.

It is clearly a raised area, for it can be reached only by ascending many stairs.

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

Like most Sumerian syllabic words, mu had a primary meaning; in the case of mu, it was "that which rises straight." Its thirty-odd nuances encompassed the meanings "heights," "fire," "command," "a counted period," as well as (in later times) "that by which one is remembered."

If we trace the written sign for mu from its Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform stylizations to its original Sumerian pictographs, the following pictorial evidence emerges:

We clearly see a conical chamber, depicted by itself or with a narrow section attached to it.

"From a golden chamber-in-the-sky I will watch over thee," Inanna promised to the Assyrian king.

Was this mu the "heavenly chamber"?

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

Lady of Heaven:

She puts on the Garment of Heaven;

She valiantly ascends towards Heaven.

Over all the peopled lands

she flies in her MU.

Lady, who in her MU

to the heights of Heaven joyfully wings. .

Over all the resting places

she flies in her MU.

There is evidence to show that the people of the eastern Mediterranean had seen such a rocket-like object not only in a temple enclosure but actually in flight.

Hittite glyphs, for example, showed - against a background of starry heavens - cruising missiles, rockets mounted on launch pads, and a god inside u radiating chamber.

Professor H. Frankfort (Cylinder Seals), demonstrating how both the art of making the Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the subjects depicted on them spread throughout the ancient world, reproduces the design on a seal found in Crete and dated to the thirteenth century B.C.

The seal design clearly depicts a rocket ship moving in the skies and propelled by flames escaping from its rear.

The winged horses, the entwined animals, the winged celestial globe, and the deity with horns protruding from his headdress are all known Mesopotamian themes.

It can certainly be assumed that the fiery rocket shown on the Cretan seal was also an object familiar throughout the ancient Near East.

Indeed, a rocket with "wings" or fins - reachable by a "ladder" - can be seen on a tablet excavated at Gezer, a town in ancient Canaan, west of Jerusalem. The double imprint of the same seal also shows a rocket resting on the ground next to a palm tree.

The celestial nature or destination of the objects is attested by symbols of the Sun, Moon, and zodiacal constellations that adorn the seal.

The Mesopotamian texts that refer to the inner enclosures of temples, or to the heavenly journeys of the gods, or even to instances where mortals ascended to the heavens, employ the Sumerian term mu or its Semitic derivatives shu-mu ("that which is a mu"), sham, or shem.

Because the term also connoted "that by which one is remembered," the word has come to be taken as meaning "name." But the universal application of "name" to early texts that spoke of an object used in flying has obscured the true meaning of the ancient records.

Thus G. A. Barton (The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad) established the unchallenged translation of Gudea's temple inscription - that "Its MU shall hug the lands from horizon to horizon" - as "Its name shall fill the lands."

A hymn to Ishkur, extolling his "ray-emitting MU" that could attain the heights of Heaven, was likewise rendered:

"Thy name is radiant, it reaches Heaven's zenith."

Sensing, however, that mu or shem may mean an object and not "name," some scholars have treated the term as a suffix or grammatical phenomenon not requiring translation and have thereby avoided the issue altogether.

It is not too difficult to trace the etymology of the term, and the route by which the "sky chamber" assumed the meaning of "name."

Sculptures have been found that show a god inside a rocket-shaped chamber, as in this object of extreme antiquity (now in the possession of the University Museum, Philadelphia) where the celestial nature of the chamber is attested by the twelve globes decorating it.

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

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

It was only a matter of time before kings and rulers - associating these pillars (called stelae) with the ability to ascend to the Heavenly Abode - began to carve their own images upon the stelae as a way of associating themselves with the Eternal Abode.

If they could not escape a physical oblivion, it was important that at least their "name" be forever commemorated.

That the purpose of the commemorative stone pillars was to simulate a fiery skyship can further be gleaned from the term by which such stone stelae were known in antiquity.

• • The Sumerians called them NA.RU ("stones that rise").

  • The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians called them naru ("objects that give off light").

  • The Amurru called them nuras ("fiery objects" - in Hebrew, ner still means a pillar that emits light, and thus today's "candle").

  • In the Indo-European tongues of the Hurrians and the Hittites, the stelae were called hu-u-ashi ("fire bird of stone").

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

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

And I will give them,

In my House and within my walls,

A yad and a shem.

Literally translated, this would amount to the Lord's promise to provide his people with a "hand" and a "name."

Fortunately, however, from ancient monuments called yad's that still stand in the Holy Land, we learn that they were distinguished by tops shaped like pyramidions.

The shem, on the other hand, was a memorial with an oval top. Both, it seems evident, began as simulations of the "sky chamber," the gods' vehicle for ascending to the Eternal Abode. In ancient Egypt, in fact, the devout made pilgrimages to a special temple at Heliopolis to view and worship the ben-ben - a pyramidion-shaped object in which the gods had arrived on Earth in times immemorial.

Egyptian pharaohs, on their deaths, were subjected to a ceremony of "opening of the mouth," in which they were supposed to be transported by a similar yad or a shem to the divine Abode of Eternal Life.

The persistence of biblical translators to employ "name" wherever they encounter shem has ignored a 'farsighted study published more than a century ago by G. M. Redslob (in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesell-schaft) in which he correctly pointed out that the term shem and the term shamaim ("heaven") stem from the root word shamah, meaning "that which is highward."

When the Old Testament reports that King David "made a shem" to mark his victory over the Aramaeans, Redslob said, he did not "make a name" but set up a monument pointing skyward.

The realization that murr shem in many Mesopotamian texts should be read not as "name" but as "sky vehicle" opens the way to the understanding of the true meaning of many ancient tales, including the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

The Book of Genesis, in its eleventh chapter, reports on the attempt by humans to raise up a shem. The biblical account is given in concise (and precise) language that bespeaks historical fact. Yet generations of scholars and translators have sought to impart to the tale only an allegorical meaning because - as they understood it - it was a tale concerning Mankind's desire to "make a name" for itself. Such an approach voided the tale of its factual meaning; our conclusion regarding the true meaning of shem makes the tale as meaningful as it must have been to the people of antiquity themselves.

The biblical tale of the Tower of Babel deals with events that followed the repopulation of Earth after the Deluge, when some of the people "journeyed from the east, and they found a plain in the land of Shin'ar, and they settled there."

The Land of Shinar is, of course, the Land of Sumer, in the plain between the two rivers in southern Mesopotamia.

And the people, already knowledgeable concerning the art of brickmaking and high-rise construction for an urban civilization, said:

"Let us build us a city,

and a tower whose top shall reach the heavens;

and let us make us a shem,

lest we be scattered upon the face of the Earth."

But this human scheme was not to God's liking.

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

And he said: "Behold,

all are as one people with one language,

and this is just the beginning of their undertakings;

Now, anything which they shall scheme to do

shall no longer be impossible for them."

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

"Come, let us go down,

and there confound their language;

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

And the Lord scattered them from there

upon the face of the whole Earth,

and they ceased to build the city.

Therefore was its name called Babel,

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

The traditional translation of shem as "name" has kept the tale unintelligible for generations.

Why did the ancient residents of Babel - Babylonia - exert themselves to "make a name," why was the "name" to be placed upon "a tower whose top shall reach the heavens," and how could the "making of a name" counteract the effects of Mankind's scattering upon Earth?

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

We believe that the answers to all these questions become plausible - even obvious - once we read "skyborne vehicle" rather than "name" for the word shem, which is the term employed in the original Hebrew text of the Bible. The story would then deal with the concern of Mankind that, as the people spread upon Earth, they would lose contact with one another.

So they decided to build a "skyborne vehicle" and to erect a launch tower for such a vehicle so that they, too, could - like the goddess Ishtar, for example - fly in a mu "over all the peopled lands."

A portion of the Babylonian text known as the "Epic of Creation" relates that the first "Gateway of the Gods" was constructed in Babylon by the gods themselves.

The Anunnaki, the rank-and-file gods, were ordered to Construct the Gateway of the Gods....

Let its brickwork be fashioned.

Its shem shall be in the designated place.

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

It was thus some cheek on the part of Mankind to establish its own launch tower on a site originally used for the purpose by the gods, for the name of the place - Babili - literally meant "Gateway of the Gods."

Is there any other evidence to corroborate the biblical tale and our interpretation of it?

The Babylonian historian-priest Berossus, who in the third century B.C. compiled a history of Mankind, reported that the,

"first inhabitants of the land, glorying in their own strength... undertook to raise a tower whose 'top' should reach the sky."

But the tower was overturned by the gods and heavy winds,

"and the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken the same language."

George Smith (The Chaldean Account of Genesis) found in the writings of the Greek historian Hestaeus a report that, in accordance with "olden traditions," the people who had escaped the Deluge came to Senaar in Babylonia but were driven away from there by a diversity of tongues.

The historian Alexander Polyhistor (first century B.C.) wrote that all men formerly spoke the same language. Then some undertook to erect a large and lofty tower so that they might "climb up to heaven." But the chief god confounded their design by sending a whirlwind; each tribe was given a different language.

"The city where it happened was Babylon."

There is little doubt by now that the biblical tales, as well as the reports of the Greek historians of 2,000 years ago and of their predecessor Berossus, all stem from earlier - Sumerian - origins.

A. H. Sayce (The Religion of the Babylonians) reported reading on a fragmentary tablet in the British Museum "the Babylonian version of the building of the Tower of Babel." In all instances, the attempt to reach the heavens and the ensuing confusion of tongues are basic elements of the version. There are other Sumerian texts that record the deliberate confusion of Man's tongue by an irate god.

Mankind, presumably, did not possess at that time the technology required for such an aerospace project; the guidance and collaboration of a knowledgeable god was essential. Did such a god defy the others to help Mankind?

A Sumerian seal depicts a confrontation between armed gods, apparently over the disputed construction by men of a stage tower.

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

It was put up circa 2300 B.C. by Naram-Sin, king of Akkad, and scholars have assumed that it depicts the king victorious over his enemies. But the large central figure is that of a deity and not of the human king, for the person is wearing a helmet adorned with horns - the identifying mark exclusive to the gods. Furthermore, this central figure does not appear to be the leader of the smaller-sized humans, but to be trampling upon them.

These humans, in turn, do not seem to be engaged in any warlike activities, but to be marching toward, and standing in adoration of, the same large conical object on which the deity's attention is also focused.

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

The conical object is shown reaching toward three celestial bodies.

If its size, shape, and purpose indicate that it was a shem, then the scene depicted an angry and fully armed god trampling upon people celebrating the raising of a shem, 

Both the Mesopotamia!! texts and the biblical account impart the same moral: The flying machines were meant for the gods and not for Mankind.

Men - assert both Mesopotamian and biblical texts - could ascend to the Heavenly Abode only upon the express wish of the gods. And therein lie more tales of ascents to the heavens and even of space flights.

The Old Testament records the ascent to the heavens of several mortal beings.

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

The other mortal was the prophet Elijah, who was lifted off Earth and taken heavenward in a "whirlwind."

A little-known reference to a third mortal who visited the Divine Abode and was endowed there with great wisdom is provided in the Old Testament, and it concerns the ruler of Tyre (a Phoenician center on the eastern Mediterranean coast).

We read in Chapter 28 of the Book of Ezekiel that the Lord commanded the prophet to remind the king how, perfect and wise, he was enabled by the Deity to visit with the gods:

Thou art molded by a plan,

full of wisdom, perfect in beauty.

Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God;

every precious stone was thy thicket. ...

Thou art an anointed Cherub, protected;

and I have placed thee in the sacred mountain;

as a god werest thou,

moving within the Fiery Stones.

Predicting that the ruler of Tyre should die a death "of the uncircumcised" by the hand of strangers even if he called out to them "I am a Deity," the Lord then told Ezekiel the reason.

After the king was taken to the Divine Abode and given access to all wisdom and riches, his heart "grew haughty," he misused his wisdom, and he defiled the temples.

Because thine heart is haughty, saying

"A god am I;

in the Abode of the Deity I sat,

in the midst of the Waters";

Though thou art a Man, not a god,

thou set thy heart as that of a Deity.

The Sumerian texts also speak of several men who were privileged to ascend to the heavens.

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

There are several important clues to be found in both the biblical and the Mesopotamia!! tales of the rare ascents of mortals to the Abode of the Gods. Adapa, too, like the king of Tyre, was made of a perfect "mold." All had to reach and employ a shem - "fiery stone" - to reach the celestial "Eden."

Some had gone up and returned to Earth; others, like the Mesopotamian hero of the Deluge, stayed there to enjoy the company of the gods. It was to find this Mesopotamian "Noah" and obtain from him the secret of the Tree of Life, that the Sumerian Gilgamesh set out.

The futile search by mortal Man for the Tree of Life is the subject of one of the longest, most powerful epic texts bequeathed to human culture by the Sumerian civilization. Named by modern scholars "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the moving tale concerns the ruler of Uruk who was born to a mortal father and a divine mother.

As a result, Gilgamesh was considered to be "two-thirds of him god, one-third of him human," a circumstance that prompted him to seek escape from the death that was the fate of mortals.

Tradition had informed him that one of his forefathers, Utnapishtirn - the hero of the Deluge - had escaped death, having been taken to the Heavenly Abode together with his spouse. Gilgamesh therefore decided to reach that place •and obtain from his ancestor the secret of eternal life.

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

My mother,

During the night I felt joyful

and I walked about among my nobles.

The stars assembled in the Heavens.

The handiwork of Anu descended toward me.

I sought to lift it; it was too heavy.

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

The people of Uruk gathered about it,

While the nobles kissed its legs.

As I set my forehead, they gave me support.

I raised it. I brought it to thee.

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

But obviously Gilgamesh was encouraged by the sighting of the falling object - "the handiwork of Anu" - to embark on his adventure. In the introduction to the epic, the ancient reporter called Gilgamesh "the wise one, he who has experienced everything":

Secret things he has seen,

what is hidden to Man he knows;

He even brought tidings of a time before the Deluge.

He also took the distant journey,

wearisome and under difficulties;

He returned,

and engraved all his toil upon a stone pillar.

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

Their target was the Land of Tilmun, for there Gilgamesh could raise a shem for himself. The current translations employ the expected "name" where the Sumerian mu or the Akkadian shumu appear in the ancient texts; we shall, however, employ shem instead so that the term's true meaning - a "skyborne vehicle" - will come through:

The ruler Gilgamesh

toward the Land of Tilmun set his mind.

He says to his companion Enkidu:

"O Enkidu...

I would enter the Land, set up my shem.

In the places where the shem's were raised up

I would raise my shem."

Unable to dissuade him, both the elders of Uruk and the gods whom Gilgamesh consulted advised him to first obtain the consent and assistance of Utu/Shamash.

"If thou wouldst enter the Land - inform Utu," they cautioned him.

"The Land, it is in Utu's charge," they stressed and re-stressed to him.

Thus forewarned and advised, Gilgamesh appealed to Utu for permission:

Let me enter the Land,

Let me set up my shem.

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

let me raise my shem. ...

Bring me to the landing place at. ...

Establish over me thy protection!

An unfortunate break in the tablet leaves us ignorant regarding the location of "the landing place."

But, wherever it was, Gilgamesh and his companion finally reached its outskirts. It was a "restricted zone," protected by awesome guards. Weary and sleepy, the two friends decided to rest overnight before continuing.

No sooner had sleep overcome them than something shook them up and awoke them.

"Didst thou arouse me?" Gilgamesh asked his comrade.

"Am I awake?" he wondered, for he was witnessing unusual sights, so awesome that he wondered whether he was awake or dreaming.

He told Enkidu:

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

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

The glare was overpowering!

A man appeared;

the fairest in the land was he.

His grace...

From under the toppled ground he pulled me out.

He gave me water to drink; my heart quieted.

Who was this man, "the fairest in the land," who pulled Gilgamesh from under the landslide, gave him water, "quieted his heart"? And what was the "overpowering glare" that accompanied the unexplained landslide?

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

In the middle of the watch his sleep was ended.

He started up, saying to his friend:

"My friend, didst thou call me?

Why am I awake?

Didst thou not touch me?

Why am I startled?

Did not some god go by?

Why is my flesh numb?"

Thus mysteriously reawakened, Gilgamesh wondered who had touched him.

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

The vision that I saw was wholly awesome!

The heavens shrieked, the earth boomed;

Daylight failed, darkness came.

Lightning flashed, a flame shot up.

The clouds swelled, it rained death!

Then the glow vanished; the fire went out.

And all that had fallen had turned to ashes.

One needs little imagination to see in these few verses an ancient account of the witnessing of the launching of a rocket ship.

First the tremendous thud as the rocket engines ignited ("the heavens shrieked"), accompanied by a marked shaking of the ground ("the earth boomed"). Clouds of smoke and dust enveloped the launching site ("daylight failed, darkness came").

Then the brilliance of the ignited engines showed through ("lightning flashed"); as the rocket ship began to climb skyward, "a flame shot up." The cloud of dust and debris "swelled" in all directions; then, as it began to fall down, "it rained death!" Now the rocket ship was high in the sky, streaking heavenward ("the glow vanished; the fire went out").

The rocket ship was gone from sight; and the debris "that had fallen had turned to ashes."

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

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

Their terror is awesome,

their glance is death.

Their shimmering spotlight sweeps the mountains.

They watch over Shamash,

As he ascends and descends.

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

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

When Gilgamesh explained his partly divine origins, the purpose of his trip ("About death and life I wish to ask Utnapishtim") and the fact that he was on his way with the consent of Utu/Shamash, the guards allowed him to go ahead.

Proceeding "along the route of Shamash," Gilgamesh found himself in utter darkness; "seeing nothing ahead or behind," he cried out in fright. Traveling for many beru (a unit of time, distance, or the arc of the heavens), he was still engulfed by darkness.

Finally,

"it had grown bright when twelve beru he attained."

The damaged and blurred text then has Gilgamesh arriving at a magnificent garden where the fruits and trees were carved of semi-precious stones.

It was there that Utnapishtim resided. Posing his problem to his ancestor, Gilgamesh encountered a disappointing answer: Man, Utnapishtim said, cannot escape his mortal fate. However, he offered Gilgamesh a way to postpone death, revealing to him the location of the Plant of Youth - "Man becomes young in old age," it was called.

Triumphant, Gilgamesh obtained the plant. But, as fate would have it, he foolishly lost it on his way back, and returned to Uruk empty-handed.

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

No pictorial depiction of what Gilgamesh saw has so far come to light. But a drawing found in the tomb of an Egyptian governor of a far land shows a rockethead above-ground in a place where date trees grow.

The shaft of the rocket is clearly stored underground, in a man-made silo constructed of tubular segments and decorated with leopard skins.

Very much in the manner of modern draftsmen, the ancient artists showed a cross-section of the underground silo.

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

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

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

Utu/Shamash was "he of the fiery rocket ships." He was, we suggest, the commander of the spaceport of the gods.

The commanding role of Utu/Shamash in matters of travel to the Heavenly Abode of the Gods, and the functions performed by his subordinates in this connection, are brought out in even greater detail in yet another Sumerian tale of a heavenward journey by a mortal.

The Sumerian king lists inform us that the thirteenth ruler of Kish was Etana,

"the one who to Heaven ascended."

This brief statement needed no elaboration, for the tale of the mortal king who journeyed up to the highest heavens was well known throughout the ancient Near East, and was the subject of numerous seal depictions.

Etana, we are told, was designated by the gods to bring Mankind the security and prosperity that Kingship - an organized civilization - was intended to provide. But Etana, it seems, could not father a son who would continue the dynasty. The only known remedy was a certain Plant of Birth that Etana could obtain only by fetching it down from the heavens.

Like Gilgamesh at a later time, Etana turned to Shamash for permission and assistance.

As the epic unfolds, it becomes clear that Etana was asking Shamash for a shem!

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

Flattered by prayer and fattened by sacrificial sheep, Shamash agreed to grant Etana's request to provide him with a shem. But instead of speaking of a shem. Shamash told Etana that an "eagle" would take him to the desired heavenly place.

Directing Etana to the pit where the Eagle had been placed, Shamash also informed the Eagle ahead of time of the intended mission. Exchanging cryptic messages with "Shamash, his lord," the Eagle was told:

"A man I will send to thee; he will take thy hand... lead him hither... do whatever he says... do as I say."

Arriving at the mountain indicated to him by Shamash,

"Etana saw the pit," and, inside it, "there the Eagle was."

"At the command of valiant Shamash," the Eagle entered into communication with Etana.

Once more, Etana explained his purpose and destination; whereupon the Eagle began to instruct Etana on the procedure for "raising the Eagle from its pit."

The first two attempts failed, but on the third one the Eagle was properly raised. At daybreak, the Eagle announced to Etana:

"My friend... up to the Heaven of Anu I will bear thee!"

Instructing him how to hold on, the Eagle took off - and they were aloft, rising fast.

As though reported by a modem astronaut watching Earth recede as his rocket ship rises, the ancient storyteller describes how Earth appeared smaller and smaller to Etana:

When he had borne him aloft one beru,

the Eagle says to him, to Etana:

"See, my friend, how the land appears!

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

The land has indeed become a mere hill,

The wide sea is just like a tub."

Higher and higher the Eagle rose; smaller and smaller Earth appeared.

When he had borne him aloft a second beru, the Eagle said:

"My friend,

Cast a glance at how the land appears!

The land has turned into a furrow....

The wide sea is just like a bread-basket."...

When he had borne him aloft a third beru,

The Eagle says to him, to Etana:

"See, my friend, how the land appears!

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

And then, as they continued to ascend, Earth was suddenly out of sight.

As I glanced around, the land had disappeared,

and upon the wide sea mine eyes could not feast.

According to one version of this tale, the Eagle and Etana did reach the Heaven of Anu.

But another version states that Etana got cold feet when he could no longer see Earth, and ordered the Eagle to reverse course and "plunge down" to Earth.

Once again, we find a biblical parallel to such an unusual report of seeing Earth from a great distance above it. Exalting the Lord Yahweh, the prophet Isaiah said of him:

"It is he who sitteth upon the circle of the Earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as insects."

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

What or who was the Eagle who took Etana to the distant heavens?

We cannot help associating the ancient text with the message beamed to Earth in July 1969 by Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft:

"Houston! Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!"

He was reporting the first landing by Man on the Moon.

"Tranquility Base" was the site of the landing; Eagle was the name of the lunar module that separated from the spacecraft and took the two astronauts inside it to the Moon (and then back to their mother craft).

When the lunar module first separated to start its own flight in Moon orbit, the astronauts told Mission Control in Houston:

"The Eagle has wings."

But "Eagle" could also denote the astronauts who manned the spacecraft. On the Apollo 11 mission, "Eagle" was also the symbol of the astronauts themselves, worn as an emblem on their suits.

Just as in the Etana tale, they, too, were "Eagles" who could fly, speak, and communicate.

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

That is exactly what we have found.

An Assyrian seal engraving from circa 1500 B.C. shows two "eagle-men" saluting a shem!

Numerous depictions of such "Eagles" - the scholars call them "bird-men" - have been found.

Most depictions show them flanking the Tree of Life, as if to stress that they, in their shem's, provided the link with the Heavenly Abode where the Bread of Life and Water of Life were to be found.

Indeed, the usual depiction of the Eagles showed them holding in one hand the Fruit of Life and in the other the Water of Life, in full conformity with the tales of Adapa, Etana, and Gilgamesh.

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

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

In the Book of Exodus, God is reported to have reminded the Children of Israel, "I have carried you upon the wings of Eagles, and have brought you unto me," confirming, it seems, that the way to reach the Divine Abode was upon the wings of Eagles - just as the tale of Etana relates. Numerous biblical verses, as a matter of fact, describe the Deity as a winged being.

Boaz welcomed Ruth into the Judaean community as "coming under the wings" of the God Yahweh.

The Psalmist sought security "under the shadow of thy wings" and described the descent of the Lord from the heavens.

"He mounted a Cherub and went flying; He soared upon windy wings."

Analyzing the similarities between the biblical El (employed as a title or generic term for the Deity) and the Canaanite El, S. Langdon (Semitic Mythology) showed that both were depicted, in text and on coins, as winged gods.

The Mesopotamian texts invariably present Utu/Shamash as the god in charge of the landing place of the shem's and of the Eagles.

And like his subordinates he was sometimes shown wearing the full regalia of an Eagle's costume.

In such a capacity, he could grant to kings the privilege of "flying on the wings of birds" and of "rising from the lower heavens to the lofty ones." And when he was launched aloft in a fiery rocket, it was he "who stretched over unknown distances, for countless hours." Appropriately, "his net was the Earth, his trap the distant skies."

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

Sumerian texts describing Sippar relate that it had a central part, hidden and protected by mighty walls. Within those walls stood the Temple of Utu, “a house which is like a house of the Heavens." In an inner courtyard of the temple, also protected by high walls, stood "erected upwards, the mighty APIN" ("an object that plows through," according to the translators).

A drawing found at the temple mound of Anu at Uruk depicts such an object. We would have been hard put a few decades ago to guess what this object was; but it is a multistage space rocket at the top of which rests the conical mu, or command cabin.

The evidence that the gods of Sumer possessed not just "flying chambers" for roaming Earth's skies but space-going multistage rocket ships also emerges from the examination of texts describing the sacred objects at Utu's temple at Sippar.

We are told that witnesses at Burner's supreme court were required to take the oath in an inner courtyard, standing by a gateway through which they could see and face three "divine objects."

These were named "the golden sphere" (the crew's cabin?), the GIR, and the alikmahrati - a term that literally meant "advancer that makes vessel go," or what we would call a motor, an engine.

What emerges here is a reference to a three-part rocket ship, with the cabin or command module at the top end, the engines at the bottom end, and the gir in the center. The latter is a term that has been used extensively in connection with space flight. The guards Gilgamesh encountered at the entrance to the landing place of Shamash were called gir-men. In the temple of Ninurta, the sacred or most guarded inner area was called the GlR.SU ("where the gir is sprung up").

Gir, it is generally acknowledged, was a term used to describe a sharp-edged object.

A close look at the pictorial sign for gir provides a better understanding of the term's "divine" nature; for what we see is a long, arrow-shaped object, divided into several parts or compartments:

That the mu could hover in Earth's skies on its own, or fly over Earth's lands when attached to a gir, or become the command module atop a multistage apin is testimony to the engineering ingenuity of the gods of Sumer, the Gods of Heaven and Earth.

A review of the Sumerian pictographs and ideograms leaves no doubt that whoever drew those signs was familiar with the shapes and purposes of rockets with tails of billowing fire, missile-like vehicles, and celestial "cabins."

Finally, let us look at the pictographic sign for "gods" in Sumerian.

The term was a two-syllable word:

• • DIN.GIR. We have already seen what the symbol for GIR was: a two-stage rocket with fins.

  • DIN, the first syllable, meant "righteous," "pure," "bright."

Put together, then, DIN.GIR as "gods" or "divine beings" conveyed the meaning "the righteous ones of the bright, pointed objects" or, more explicitly, "the pure ones of the blazing rockets."

The pictographic sign 

 can easily bringing to mind a powerful jet engine spewing flames from the end part, and a front part that is puzzlingly open. But the puzzle turns to amazement if we "spell" dingir by combining the two pictographs.

The tail of the finlike gir fits perfectly into the opening in the front of din!

Fig. 84

The astounding result is a picture of a rocket-propelled spaceship, with a landing craft docked into it perfectly - just as the lunar module was docked with the Apollo 11 spaceship!

It is indeed a three-stage vehicle, with each part fitting neatly into the other: the thrust portion containing the engines, the midsection containing supplies and equipment, and the cylindrical "sky chamber" housing the people named dingir - the gods of antiquity, the astronauts of millennia ago.

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

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

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

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

It states - unequivocally - that, at that time,

the sons of the gods

saw the daughters of man, that they were good;

and they took them for wives,

of all which they chose.

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

The Nefilim were upon the Earth,

in those days and thereafter too,

when the sons of the gods

cohabited with the daughters of the Adam,

and they bore children unto them.

They were the mighty ones of Eternity -

The People of the shem.

The above is not a traditional translation.

For a long time, the expression "The Nefilim were upon the Earth" has been translated as "There were giants upon the earth"; but recent translators, recognizing the error, have simply resorted to leaving the Hebrew term Nefilim intact in the translation.

The verse "The people of the shem," as one could expect, has been taken to mean "the people who have a name," and, thus, "the people of renown." But as we have already established, the term shem must be taken in its original meaning - a rocket, a rocket ship.

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

Contemporary theologians and biblical scholars have tended to avoid the troublesome verses, either by explaining them away allegorically or simply by ignoring them altogether. But Jewish writings of the time of the Second Temple did recognize in these verses the echoes of ancient traditions of "fallen angels."

Some of the early scholarly works even mentioned the names of these divine beings "who fell from Heaven and were on Earth in those days": Sham-Hazzai ("shem's lookout"), Uzza ("mighty") and Uzi-El ("God's might").

Malbim, a noted Jewish biblical commentator of the nineteenth century, recognized these ancient roots and explained that,

"in ancient times the rulers of countries were the sons of the deities who arrived upon the Earth from the Heavens, and ruled the Earth, and married wives from among the daughters of Man; and their offspring included heroes and mighty ones, princes and sovereigns."

These stories, Malbim said, were of the pagan gods,

"sons of the deities, who in earliest times fell down from the Heavens upon the Earth... that is why they called themselves 'Nefilim,' i.e. Those Who Fell Down."

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

And the Nefilim were the People of the Shem - the People of the Rocket Ships.

Henceforward, we shall call them by their biblical name.

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THE TWELFTH PLANET

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

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

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

This is definitely not the Sumerian notion of the Heavenly Abode of the Gods.

The Sumerians accepted the existence of such a "Heavenly Abode," a "pure place," a "primeval abode."

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

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

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

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

Made him take the road to Heaven,

and to Heaven he went up.

When he had ascended to Heaven,

he approached the Gate of Anu.

Tammuz and Gizzida were standing guard

at the Gate of Anu.

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

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

Enlil enters the throne room of Ami,

seats himself at the place of the right tiara,

on the right of Anu.

Ea enters [the throne room of Anu],

seats himself at the place of the sacred tiara,

on the left of Anu.

The Gods of Heaven and Earth of the ancient Near East not only originated in the heavens but could also return to the Heavenly Abode.

Anu occasionally came down to Earth on state visits; Ishtar went up to Anu at least twice. Enlil's center in Nippur was equipped as a "bond heaven-earth." Shamash was in charge of the Eagles and the launching place of the rocket ships. Gilgamesh went up to the Place of Eternity and returned to Uruk; Adapa, too, made the trip and came back to tell about it; so did the biblical king of Tyre.

A number of Mesopotamian texts deal with the Apkallu, an Akkadian term stemming from the Sumerian AB.GAL ("great one who leads," or "master who points the way"). A study by Gustav Guterbock (Die Historische Tradition und Ihre Literarische Gestaltung bei Babylonier and Hethiten) ascertained that these were the "bird-men" depicted as the "Eagles" that we have already shown.

The texts that spoke of their feats said of one that he "brought down Inanna from Heaven, to the E-Anna temple made her descend." This and other references indicate that these Apkallu were the pilots of the spaceships of the Nefilim.

Two-way travel was not only possible but actually contemplated to begin with, for we are told that, having decided to establish in Sumer the Gateway of the Gods (Babili), the leader of the gods explained:

When to the Primeval Source

for assembly you shall ascend,

There shall be a restplace for the night

to receive you all.

When from the Heavens

for assembly you shall descend,

There shall be a restplace for the night

to receive you all.

Realizing that such two-way travel between Earth and the Heavenly Abode was both contemplated and practiced, the people of Sumer did not exile their gods to distant galaxies.

The Abode of the Gods, their legacy discloses, was within our own solar system.

We have seen Shamash in his official uniform as Commander of the Eagles. On each of his wrists he wears a watchlike object held in place by metal clasps. Other depictions of the Eagles reveal that all the important ones wore such objects. Whether they were merely decorative or served a useful purpose, we do not know.

But all scholars are agreed that the objects represented rosettes - a circular cluster of "petals" radiating from a central point.

The rosette was the most common decorative temple symbol throughout the ancient lands, prevalent in Mesopotamia, western Asia, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete^ and Greece.

It is the accepted view that the rosette as a temple symbol was an outgrowth or stylization of a celestial phenomenon - a sun encircled by its satellites. That the ancient astronauts wore this symbol on their wrists adds credence to this view.

An Assyrian depiction of the Gateway of Ami in the Heavenly Abode confirms ancient familiarity with a celestial system such as our Sun and its planets.

The gateway is flanked by two Eagles - indicating that their services are needed to reach the Heavenly Abode. The Winged Globe - the supreme divine emblem - marks the gateway. It is flanked by the celestial symbols of the number seven and the crescent, representing (we believe) Ami flanked by Enlil and Enki.

Where are the celestial bodies represented by these symbols? Where is the Heavenly Abode?

The ancient artist answers with yet another depiction, that of a large celestial deity extending its rays to eleven smaller celestial bodies encircling it. It is a representation of a Sun, orbited by eleven planets.

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

When the central god or celestial body in the Berlin seal is enlarged, we can see that it depicts a large, ray-emitting star surrounded by eleven heavenly bodies-planets.

These, in turn, rest on a chain of twenty-four smaller globes. Is it only a coincidence that the number of all the "moons," or satellites, of the planets in our solar system (astronomers exclude those of ten miles 01 less in diameter) is also exactly twenty-four?

Now there is, of course, a catch to claiming that these depictions - of a Sun and eleven planets - represent our solar system, for our scholars tell us that the planetary system of which Earth is a part comprises the Sun, Earth and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

This adds up to the Sun and only ten planets (when the Moon is counted as one).

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

We shall call it the Twelfth Planet.

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

We know today that beyond the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn - at distances insignificant in terms of the universe, but immense in human terms - two more major planets (Uranus and Neptune) and a third, small one (Pluto) belong to our solar system. But such knowledge is quite recent. Uranus was discovered, through the use of improved telescopes, in 1781.

After observing it for some fifty years, some astronomers reached the conclusion that its orbit revealed the influence of yet another planet. Guided by such mathematical calculations, the missing planet - named Neptune - was pinpointed by astronomers in 1846.