Template:Introduction

INTRODUCTION

Some 445,000 years ago, astronauts from another planet came to Earth in search of gold. Splashing down in one of Earth's seas, they waded ashore and established Eridu, "Home in the Faraway." In time the initial settlement expanded to a full-fledged Mission Earth-with a Mission Control Center, a spaceport, mining operations, and even a way station on Mars. Short of manpower, the astronauts employed genetic engineering to fashion Primitive Workers-Homo sapiens. The Deluge that catastrophically swept over the Earth required a fresh start; the astronauts became gods, granting Mankind civilization, teaching it to worship.Then, about four thousand years ago, all that had been achieved unraveled in a nuclear calamity, brought about by the visitors to Earth in the course of their own rivalries and wars.

What had taken place on Earth, and especially the events since human history began, has been culled by Zecharia Sitchin, in his The Earth Chronicles Series, from the Bible, clay tablets, ancient myths, and archaeological discoveries. But what had preceded the events on Earth-what had taken place on the astronauts' own planet Nibiru that caused the space journeys, the need for gold, the creation of Man.

What emotions, rivalries, beliefs, morals (or the lack thereof) motivated the principal players in the celestial and space sagas? What were the relationships that caused mounting tensions on Nibiru and on Earth, what tensions arose between old and young, between those who had come from Nibiru and those born on Earth? And to what extent was what had happened determined by Destiny-a destiny whose record of past events holds the key to the future?

Would it not be auspicious were one of the key players, an eyewitness and one who could distinguish between Fate and Destiny, to record for posterity the How and Where and When and Why of it all-the First Things and perhaps the Last Things'

But that is precisely what some of them did do; and foremost among them was the very leader who had commanded the first group of astronauts!

Scholars and theologians alike now recognize that the biblical tales of Creation, of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, were based on texts written down millennia earlier in Mesopotamia, especially by the Sumerians. And they, in turn, clearly stated that they obtained their knowledge of past events-many from a time before civilizations began, even before Mankind came to be-from the writings of the Anunnaki ("Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came")-the "gods" of antiquity.

As a result of a century and a half of archaeological discoveries in the ruins of the ancient civilizations, especially in the Near East, a great number of such early texts have been found; the finds have also revealed the extent of missing texts-so-called lost books-which are either mentioned in discovered texts or are inferred from such texts, or that are known to have existed because they were cataloged in royal or temple libraries.

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Sometimes the "secrets of the gods" were partly revealed in epic tales, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, that disclosed the debate among the gods that led to the decision to let Mankind perish in the Deluge, or in a text titled Atra Hasis, which recalled the mutiny of the Anunnaki who had toiled in the gold mines that led to the creation of Primitive Workers-Earthlings. From time to time the leaders of the astronauts themselves authored compositions: sometimes dictating the text to a chosen scribe, as the text called The Erra Epos, in which one of the two gods who had caused the nuclear calamity sought to shift the blame to his adversary; sometime the god acted as his own scribe, as is the case regarding the Book of the Secrets of Thoth (the Egyptian god of knowledge), which the god had secreted in a subterranean chamber.

When the Lord God Yahweh, according to the Bible, granted the Commandments to His chosen people, He at first inscribed in His own hand two stone tablets that He gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. When Moses threw down and broke that first set of tablets in response to the golden calf incident, the replacement set was written by Moses on the tablets, on both their sides, when he stayed on the Mount forty days and forty nights recording the dictated words of the Lord.

Were it not for a tale recorded on papyrus from the time of the Egyptian king Khufu (Cheops) concerning the Book of the Secrets of Thoth, the existence of that book would have not become known. Were it not for the biblical narratives in Exodus and Deuteronomy, we would have never known about the divine tablets and their contents; all would have become part of the enigmatic body of "lost books" whose very existence would have never come to light. No less painful is the fact that in some instances we do know that certain texts had existed, but are in the dark regarding their contents. Such is the case regarding the Book of the Wars of Yahweh and the Book of Dasher ("Book of Righteousness"), which are specifically mentioned in the Bible. In at least two instances, the existence of olden books-earlier texts known to the biblical narrator-can be inferred. Chapter five of Genesis begins with the statement "This is the book of the Toledoth of Adam," the term Toledoth being usually translated as "generations" but more accurately meaning "historic or genealogical record." The other instance is in chapter six of Genesis, where the events concerning Noah and the Deluge begin with the words "These are the Toledoth of Noah." Indeed, partial versions of a book that became known as the Book of Adam and Eve have survived over the millennia in Armenian, Slavonic, Syriac, and Ethiopic languages; and the Book of Enoch (one of the so-called Apocryphal books that were not included in the canonized Bible) contains segments that are considered by scholars to be fragments from a much earlier Book of Noah.

An oft-quoted example of the extent of lost books is that of the famed Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Established by the general Ptolemy after Alexander's death in 323 B.C., it was said to have contained more than half a million "volumes"-books inscribed on a variety of materials (clay, stone, papyrus, parchment). That great library, where scholars gathered to study the accumulated knowledge, was burnt down and destroyed in wars that extended from 48 B.C. to the Arab conquest in A.D. 642. What has remained of its treasures is a translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, and fragments retained in the writings of some of the library's resident scholars.

It is only thus that we know that the second king Ptolemy commissioned, circa 270 B.C., an Egyptian priest whom the Greeks called Manetho to compile the history and prehistory of Egypt. At first, Manetho wrote, only the gods reigned there, then demigods, and finally, circa 3100 B.C., Pharaonic dynasties began.

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The divine reigns, he wrote, began ten thousand years before the Flood and continued for thousands of years thereafter, the latter period having witnessed battles and wars among the gods.

In the Asiatic domains of Alexander, where reign fell into the hands of the general Seleucos and his successors, a similar effort to provide the Greek savants with a record of past events took place. A priest of the Babylonian god Marduk, Berossus, with access to libraries of clay tablets whose core was the temple library of Harran (now in southeastern Turkey), wrote down in three volumes a history of gods and men that began- 432,000 years before the Deluge, when the gods came to Earth from the heavens. Listing by name and reign durations the first ten commanders, Berossus reported that the first leader, dressed as a fish, waded ashore from the sea. He was the one who gave Mankind civilization; and his name, rendered in Greek, was Cannes.

Dovetailing in many details, both priests thus rendered accounts of gods of heaven who had come to Earth, of a time when gods alone reigned on Earth, and of the catastrophic Deluge. In the fragmentary bits and pieces retained (in other contemporary writings) from the three volumes, Berossus specifically reported the existence of writings from before the Great Flood- stone tablets that were hidden for safekeeping in an ancient city called Sippar, one of the original cities established by the ancient gods.

Though Sippar, as were other pre-Diluvial cities of the gods, was overwhelmed and obliterated by the Deluge, a reference to the pre-Diluvial writings surfaced in the annals of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668-633 B.C.). When archaeologists, in the mid-nineteenth century, found the ancient Assyrian capital Nineveh-until then known only from the Old Testament-they discovered in the ruins of palace a library with the remains of some 25,000 inscribed clay tablets. An assiduous collector of "olden texts," Ashurbanipal boasted-in his annals, "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."

It is now known that the Shumerian (or Sumerian) civilization had blossomed in what is now Iraq almost a millennium before the beginning of the Pharaonic age in Egypt, both to be followed later by the civilization of the Indus Valley in the Indian subcontinent. It is now also known that the Sumerians were the first to write down the annals and tales of gods and men, from which all other peoples, including the Hebrews, obtained the tales of Creation, of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Deluge, the Tower of Babel; and of the wars and loves of the gods, as reflected in the writings and recollections of the Greeks, Hittites, Canaanites, Persians, and Indo-Europeans. As all these olden writings attest, their sources were even earlier texts-some found, many lost.

The volume of such early writings is staggering; not thousands but tens of thousands of clay tablets have been discovered in the ruins of the ancient Near East. Many deal with or record aspects of daily life, such as trade or workers' wages and nuptial contracts. Others, found mostly in palace libraries, constitute Royal Annals; still others, discovered in the ruins of temple libraries or of scribal schools, constitute a group of canonized texts, a secret literature, that were written down in the Sumerian language and then translated to Akkadian (the first Semitic language) and then other ancient languages. And even in those early writings-going back almost six thousand years-references are made to lost "books" (texts inscribed on stone tablets).

Among the incredible-to say fortunate does not fully convey the miracle-finds in the ruins of ancient cities and their libraries are clay prisms inscribed with the very information about the ten pre-Diluvial

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rulers and their 432,000 years' total reign to which Berossus had referred. Known as the Sumerian King Lists (and on display in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England), their several versions leave no doubt that their Sumerian compilers had access to some earlier common or canonized textual material. Coupled with other equally early texts, discovered in various states of preservation, they strongly suggest that the original recorder of the Arrival, as well as of preceding events and certainly of following events, had to be one of those leaders, a key participant, an eyewitness.

One who had been an eyewitness to all those events, indeed a key participant in them, was the leader who had splashed down with the first group of astronauts. At that time his epithet-name was E.A., "He Whose Home Is Water." He experienced the disappointment of having command of Earth Mission given to his half brother and rival EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command"), a humiliation little mitigated by granting him the title EN.K1, "Lord of Earth." Relegated away from the cities of the gods and their spaceport in the E.DIN ("Eden") to supervise the mining of gold in the AB.ZU (southeastern Africa), it was Ea/Enki-a great scientist-who came across the hominids who inhabited those parts. And so when the Anunnaki toiling in the gold mines mutinied and said, "No more!" it was he who realized that the needed manpower could be obtained by jumping the gun on evolution through genetic engineering; and thus did the Adam (literally, "He of the Earth," Earthling) come into being.

As a hybrid, the Adam could not procreate; the events echoed in the biblical tale of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden record the second genetic manipulation by Enki that added the extra chromosomal genes needed for sexual procreation.

And when Mankind, proliferating, did not turn out the way it had been envisaged, it was he, Enki, who defied his brother Enlil's plan to let Mankind perish in the Deluge-the events whose hero has been called Noah in the Bible and Ziusudra in the earlier original Sumerian text.

The firstborn son of Anu, Nibiru's ruler, Ea/Enki was well versed in his planet's (Nibiru) and its inhabitants' past. An accomplished scientist, he bequeathed the most important aspects of the advanced knowledge of the Anunnaki especially to his two sons Marduk and Ningishzidda (who, as Egyptian gods, were known there as Ra and Thoth, respectively). But he also was instrumental in sharing with Mankind certain aspects of such advanced knowledge, by teaching to selected individuals the "secrets of the gods." In at least two instances, such initiates wrote down (as they were instructed to do) those divine teachings as Mankind's heritage. One, called Adapa and probably a son of Enki by a human female, is known to have written a book titled Writings Regarding Time-one of the earliest lost books. The other, called Enmeduranki, was in all probability the prototype of the biblical Enoch, the one who was taken up to heaven after he had entrusted to his sons the book of divine secrets, and of which a version has possibly survived in the extrabiblical Book of Enoch.

Though the firstborn of Anu, he was not destined to be his father's successor on the throne of Nibiru. Complex rules of succession, which reflected the convoluted history of the Nibiruans, gave that privilege to Enki's half brother Enlil. In the effort to resolve the bitter conflict, both Enki and Enlil ended up on a mission to an alien planet-Earth-whose gold was needed to create a shield for preserving Nibiru's dwindling atmosphere. It was against that background, made even more complex by the presence on Earth of their half sister Ninharsag (the Chief Medical Officer of the Anunnaki), that Enki decided to defy Enlil's plan to have Mankind perish in the Deluge.

The conflict carried on between the two half brothers' sons, even among their grandchildren; the fact

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that all of them, and especially those born on Earth, faced the loss of longevity that Nibiru's extended orbital period provided added personal agonies and sharpened ambitions. It all came to a climax in the last century of the third millennium B.C. when Marduk, Enki's firstborn by his official spouse, claimed that he and not Enlil's firstborn son, Ninurta, should inherit the Earth. The bitter conflict that included a series of wars led in the end to the use of nuclear weapons; the ensuing though unintended result was the demise of the Sumerian civilization.

The initiation of chosen individuals into the "secrets of the gods" had marked the beginning of Priesthood, the lineages of mediators between the gods and the people, the transmitters of the Divine Words to the mortal Earthlings. Oracles-interpretations of divine utterances were commingled with the observation of the heavens for omens.

And as Mankind was increasingly drawn to take sides in the godly conflicts, Prophecy began to play a role. Indeed, the term to denote such spokesmen of the gods who proclaimed what was to come, Nabih, was the epithet for Marduk's firstborn son, Nabu, who had tried, on behalf of his exiled father, to convince Mankind that the heavenly signs bespoke the coming supremacy of Marduk.

These developments sharpened the realization that one must distinguish between Fate and Destiny. The proclamations of Enlil, sometimes even of Anu, that used to be unquestioned were now subjected to the scrutiny of the difference between NAM-a Destiny, like the planetary orbits, whose course had been determined and was unchangeable-and NAM.TAR, literally, a destiny that could be bent, broken, changedwhich was Fate. Reviewing and recalling the sequence of events, and the apparent parallelism between what had happened on Nibiru and what took place on Earth, Enki and Enlil began to ponder philosophically what indeed was destined and could not have been avoided, and what was just fated as a consequence of right or wrong decisions and free choice. The latter could not be predicted; the former could be foreseen-especially if all, as the planetary orbits, was cyclical; if what was shall again be, if the First Things shall also be the Last Things.

The climactic event of the nuclear desolation sharpened soul-searching among the leaders of the Anunnaki and raised the need to explain to the devastated human masses why it came to pass this way. Was it destined or was it just the result of an Anunnaki-made fate? Was anyone responsible, is there someone accountable?

In the Councils of the Anunnaki on the eve of the calamity, it was Enki who stood alone in opposition to the use of the forbidden weapon. It was thus important for Enki to explain to the suffering remnants hot, that turning point in the saga of extraterrestrials who had meant well but ended as destroyers had come to pass. And who but Ea/Enki, who was the first to come and an eyewitness to it all, was most qualified to tell the Pas, so that the Future could be divined? And the best way to tell it all was as a first-person report by Enki himself.

That he had recorded his autobiography is certain, for a long text (stretching over at least twelve tablets) discovered in the library

Nippur quotes Erki as saying

When I approached Earth, there was much flooding.

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When I neared its green meadows,

heaps and mounds were piled up at my command.

In a pure place I built my house, an appropriate name I gave it.

The long text continues to describe how Ea/Enki then assigned tasks to his lieutenants, putting their Mission to Earth in motion.

Numerous other texts that relate varied aspects of Enki's role in the ensuing developments serve to complete Enki's tale; they include a comogony, an Epic of Creation, at whose core lay Enki's own text, which scholars call The Eridu Genesis. They include detailed descriptions of the fashioning of the Adam. They describe how other Anunnaki, male and female, came to Enki in his city Eridu to obtain from him the ME-a kind of data-disc that encoded all aspects of civilization; and they include texts of Enki's private life and personal problems, such as the tale of his attempts to attain a son by his half sister Ninharsag, his promiscuous affairs with both goddesses and the Daughters of Man, and the unforeseen consequences thereof. -The Atra Hasis text throws light on Anu's efforts to prevent a flare-up of the Enki-Enlil rivalries by dividing Earth's domains between them; and texts recording the events preceding the Deluge render almost verbatim the debates in the Council of the Gods about the fate of Mankind and Enki's subterfuge known as the tale of Noah and the ark-a tale known only from the Bible until one of its original Mesopotamian versions was found in the tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets; Babylonian and Assyrian temple libraries; Egyptian, Hittite, and Canaanite "myths"; and the biblical narratives are the main body of written-down memories of the affairs of gods and men. For the first time ever, this dispersed and fragmented material has been assembled and used by Zecharia Sitchin to re-create the eyewitness account of Enki- the autobiographical memoirs and insightful prophecies of an extraterrestrial god.

Presented as a text dictated by Enki to a chosen scribe, a Book of Witnessing to be unsealed at an appropriate time, it brings to mind Yahweh's instructions to the Prophet Isaiah (seventh century B.C.):

Now come,

Write it on a sealed tablet, as a book engrave it;

Let it be a witnessing until the last day, a testimony for all time.

Isaiah 30:8

In dealing with the past, Enki himself perceived the future. The notion that the Anunnaki, exercising free will, were masters of their own fates (as well as the fate of Mankind) gave way, in the end, to a realization that it was Destine that, when all was said and done, determined the course of events; and therefore-as the Hebrew Prophets had recognized-the First Things shall be the Last Things.

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