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GONE WITH THE WIND
The unleashing of “weapons of mass destruction” in the Middle East
underlies the fear of Armageddon prophecies coming true. The sad
fact is that a mounting conflict—among gods, not men—did lead to the
use of nuclear weapons, right there, four thousand years ago. And if
there ever was a most regrettable act with the most unexpected
consequences, that was it.
That nuclear weapons had been used on Earth for the first time not
in l945 A.D. but in 2024 b.c.e. is fact, not fiction. The fateful
event is described in a variety of ancient texts from which the What
and How, the Why and Who can be construed, reconstructed and put in
context. Those ancient sources include the Hebrew Bible, for the
first Hebrew Patriarch, Abraham, was an eyewitness to the awesome
calamity.
The failure of the War of the Kings to subdue the “rebel lands” of
course discouraged the Enlilites and encouraged the Mardukites, but
the events did more than that. On Enlil’s instructions, Ninurta got
busy setting up an alternative space facility on the other side of
the world—all the way in what is now Peru in South America.
The
texts indicate that Enlil himself was away from Sumer for long
stretches of time. These gods’ moves caused the last two kings of
Sumer, Shu-Sin and Ibbi-Sin, to waver in their allegiances and to
start paying homage to Enki in his Sumerian foothold, Eridu. The
divine absences also loosened controls over the Elamite “Foreign
Legion,” and the records speak of “sacrileges” by the Elamite
troops.
Gods and men were increasingly disgusted with it all.
Especially enraged was Marduk, who received word of looting,
destructions, and desecrations in his cherished Babylon. It will be
recalled that the last time he was there he was persuaded by his
half-brother Nergal to leave peacefully until the Celestial Time
would reach the Age of the Ram. He did so having received Nergal’s
solemn word that nothing would be disturbed or desecrated in
Babylon, but the opposite happened.
Marduk was angered by the
reported desecration of his temple there by the “unworthy” Elamites:
“To herds of dogs Babylon’s temple they made a den; flying ravens,
loudly shrieking, their dung dropped there.”
From Harran he cried out to the great gods:
“Until When?”
Has not
the Time arrived yet, he asked in his prophetic autobiography:
O great gods, learn my secrets
as I girdle my belt, my memories remember.
I am the divine Marduk, a great god.
I was cast off for my sins,
to the mountains I have gone.
In many lands I have been a wanderer.
From where the sun rises to where it sets I went.
To the highland of Hatti I came.
In Hattiland I asked for an oracle;
in it I asked: “Until when?”
“Twenty-four years in Harran’s midst I nested,” Marduk went on; “my
days are completed!”
The time has come, he said, to set his course
to his city (Babylon), “my temple to rebuild, my everlasting abode
to establish.” Waxing visionary, he spoke of seeing his temple E.SAG.ILA (“Temple whose head is lofty”) rising as a mountain upon a
platform in Babylon, calling it “The house of my covenant.” He
foresaw Babylon as forever established, a king of his choice
installed there, a city filled with joy, a city blessed by Anu.
The
messianic times, Marduk prophesied, will “chase away evil and bad
luck, bring motherly love to Mankind.”
The year in which a sojourn of twenty-four years in Harran was
completed was 2024 b.c.e.; it marked seventy-two years since Marduk
had agreed to depart from Babylon and await the oracular celestial
time.
Marduk’s “until when?” appeal to the Great Gods was not an idle one,
for the leadership of the Anunnaki was constantly consulting,
informally and in formal councils.
Alarmed by the worsening
situation, Enlil hurriedly returned to Sumer, and was shocked to
learn that things had gone wrong even in Nippur itself.
Ninurta was
summoned to explain the Elamites’ misconduct, but Ninurta put all
the blame on Marduk and Nabu. Nabu was summoned, and,
“Before the
gods the son of his father came.”
His main accuser was Utu/ Shamash,
who, describing the dire situation, said,
“all this Nabu has caused
to happen.”
Speaking for his father, Nabu blamed Ninurta, and
revived the old accusations against Nergal in regard to the
disappearance of the pre-Diluvial monitoring instruments and the
failure to prevent sacrileges in Babylon; he got into a shouting
match with Nergal, and
“showing disrespect... to Enlil evil he
spoke: ‘There is no justice, destruction was conceived, Enlil
against Babylon caused evil to be planned.’”
It was an unheard-of
accusation against the Lord of the Command.
Enki spoke up, but it was in defense of his son, not of Enlil. What
are Marduk and Nabu actually accused of? he asked. His ire was
directed especially at his son Nergal:
“Why do you continue the
opposition?” he asked him.
The two argued so much that in the end Enki shouted to Nergal to get out of his presence. The gods’
councils broke up in disarray.
But all these debates, accusations, and counteraccusations were
taking place against the increasingly realized fact— what Marduk
referred to as the Celestial Oracle: with the passage of time—with
the crucial shift of the precessional clock by one degree—the Age of
the Bull, the zodiacal age of Enlil, was coming to an end, and the
Age of the Ram, Marduk’s Age, was looming in the heavens. Ninurta
could see it coming at his Eninnu temple in Lagash (which Gudea
built); Ningishzidda/Thoth could confirm it from all the stone
circles that he had erected elsewhere on Earth; and the people knew
it, too.
It was then that Nergal—vilified by Marduk and Nabu, ordered out by
his father Enki—“consulting with himself,” concocted the idea of
resort to the “Awesome Weapons.”
He did not know where they were
hidden, but knew that they existed on Earth, locked away in a secret
underground place (according to a text catalogued as CT-xvi, lines
44–46, somewhere in Africa, in the domain of his brother Gibil):
Those seven, in the mountains they abide;
In a cavity inside the earth they dwell.
Based on our current level of technology, they can be described as
seven nuclear devices:
“Clad with terror, with a brilliance they
rush forth.”
They were brought to Earth unintentionally from Nibiru
and were hidden away in a secret safe place a long time ago; Enki
knew where, but so did Enlil.
A War Council of the gods, overruling Enki, voted to follow Nergal’s
suggestion to give Marduk a punishing blow.
There was constant
communication with Anu:
“Anu to Earth the words was speaking, Earth
to Anu the words pronounced.”
He made it clear that his approval for
the unprecedented step was limited to depriving Marduk of the Sinai
spaceport, but that neither gods nor people should be harmed:
“Anu,
lord of the gods, on the Earth had pity,” the ancient records state.
Choosing Nergal and Ninurta to carry out the mission, the gods made
absolutely clear to them its limited and conditional scope.
But that is not what happened: The “Law of Unintended Consequences”
proved itself true on a catastrophic scale.
In the aftermath of the calamity that resulted in the death of
countless people and the desolation of Sumer, Nergal dictated to a
trusted scribe his own version of the events, trying to exonerate
himself. The long text is known as the
Erra Epos, for it refers to Nergal by the epithet Erra (“The Annihilator”) and to Ninurta as
Ishum (“The Scorcher”). We can put together the true story by adding
to this text information from several other Sumerian, Akkadian, and
biblical sources.
Thus we find that no sooner was the decision reached than Nergal
rushed to Gibil’s African domain to find and retrieve the weapons,
not waiting for Ninurta.
To his dismay Ninurta learnt that Nergal
was disregarding the objective’s limits, and was going to use the
weapons indiscriminately to settle personal accounts:
“I shall
annihilate the son, and let the father bury him; then I shall kill
the father, and let no one bury him,” Nergal has boasted.
While the two argued, word reached them that Nabu was not sitting
still:
“From his temple to marshall all his cities he set his step,
toward the Great Sea he set his course; the Great Sea he entered,
sat upon a throne that was not his.”
Nabu was not only converting
the western cities, he was taking over the Mediterranean islands,
and setting himself up as their ruler!
Nergal/Erra thus argued that
destroying the spaceport was not enough: Nabu, and the cities that
rallied to him, also had to be punished, destroyed!
Now, with two targets, the Nergal-Ninurta team saw another problem:
Would the “upheavaling” of the spaceport not sound the alarm for
Nabu and his sinning followers to escape? Reviewing their targets,
they found the solution in splitting up: Ninurta would attack the
spaceport; Nergal would attack the nearby “sinning cities.”
But as
all this was agreed upon, Ninurta had second thoughts; he insisted
that not only the Anunnaki who manned the space facilities should be
forewarned, but that even certain people should be forewarned:
“Valiant Erra,” he told Nergal, “will you the righteous destroy with
the unrighteous? Will you destroy those who against you have not
sinned with those who against you have sinned?”
Nergal/Erra, the ancient text states, was persuaded:
“The words of Ishum appealed to Erra as fine oil.”
And so, one morning, the two,
sharing the seven nuclear explosives between them, set out on their
ultimate Mission:
Then did the hero Erra go ahead,
remembering the words of Ishum.
Ishum too went forth
in accordance with the words given,
a squeezing in his heart.
The available texts even tell us who went to what target:
“Ishum to
the Mount Most Supreme set his course” (we know that the spaceport
was beside this mount from the
Epic of Gilgamesh).
“Ishum raised his
hand: the Mount was smashed... That which was raised toward Anu
to launch was caused to wither, its face was made to fade away, its
place was made desolate.”
In one nuclear blow, the spaceport and its
facilities were obliterated by the hand of Ninurta.
The ancient text then describes what Nergal did:
“Emulating Ishum,
Erra the Way of the King followed, the cities he finished off, to
desolation he overturned them”; his targets were the “sinning
cities” whose kings had formed the alliance against the Kings of the
East, the plain in the south of the Dead Sea.
And so it was that in the year 2024 b.c.e. nuclear weapons were
unleashed in the Sinai Peninsula and in the nearby Plain of the Dead
Sea; and the spaceport and the Five Cities were no more.
Amazingly, yet no wonder if Abraham and his mission in Canaan is
understood the way we explain it, it is in this apocalyptic event
that the biblical record and the Mesopotamian texts converge.
We know from the Mesopotamian texts relating the events that, as
required, the Anunnaki guarding the spaceport were forewarned:
“The
two [Nergal and Ninurta], incited to commit the evil, made its
guardians stand aside; the gods of that place abandoned it—its
protectors went up to the heights of heaven.”
But while the
Mesopotamian texts reiterate that “the two made the gods flee, made
them flee the scorching,” they are ambiguous regarding whether that
advance notice was also extended to the people in the doomed cities.
It is here that the Bible provides missing details: we read in
Genesis that both Abraham and his nephew Lot were indeed
forewarned—but not the other residents of the “sinning cities.”
The biblical report, apart from throwing light on the “upheavaling”
aspects of the events, contains details that shed an amazing light
on the gods in general and on their relationship with Abraham in
particular. The story begins in Chapter 18 of Genesis when Abraham,
now ninety-nine years old, sitting at the entrance to his tent on a
hot midday, “lifted his eyes” and all of a sudden saw “three men
standing above him.”
Though they are described as Anashim, “men,”
there was something different or unusual about them, for he rushed
out of his tent and bowed to the ground, and—referring to himself as
their servant—washed their feet and offered them food.
As it turned
out, the three were divine beings.
As they leave, their leader—now identified as the Lord God—decides
to reveal to Abraham the trio’s mission: to determine whether Sodom
and Gomorrah are indeed sinning cities whose upheavaling is
justified. While two of the three continue toward Sodom, Abraham
approaches and reproaches (!) God with words that are identical to
those in the Mesopotamian text: Wilt thou destroy the righteous with
the unrighteous? (Genesis 18: 23).
What followed was an incredible bargaining session between Man and
God.
“Perchance there are fifty righteous within the city—Wilt thou
destroy, and not spare the city on account of the fifty righteous
within it?”
Abraham asked God. When told that, well, the city would
be spared if fifty righteous men reside there, Abraham said, what
about just forty? What about only thirty?
And so it went, down to
ten...
“And
Yahweh went away as soon as he had finished speaking,
and Abraham returned to his place.”
The other two divine beings—the tale’s continuation in Chapter 19
calls them Mal’achim, literally “emissaries” but commonly translated
“Angels”—arrived in Sodom in the evening. The happenings there
confirmed its people’s wickedness, and at daybreak the two urged
Abraham’s nephew Lot to escape with his family, for “Yahweh is about
to destroy the city.”
The lingering family asked for more time, and
one of the “angels” agreed to have the upheaval delayed long enough
for Lot and his family to reach the safer mountain.
“And Abraham got up early in the morning... and he looked toward
Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the Plain, and beheld,
and lo—vapor went up from the earth as the smoke of a furnace.”
Abraham was then ninety-nine years old; having been born in 2123
b.c.e., the time had to be 2024 b.c.e.
The convergence of the Mesopotamian texts with the biblical
narrative of Genesis concerning the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah
is at once one of the most significant confirmations of the Bible’s
veracity in general and of Abraham’s status and role in
particular—and yet one of the most shunned by theologians and other
scholars, because of its report of the events of the preceding day,
the day three Divine Beings (“Angels” who looked like men) had paid
Abraham a visit— it smacks too much of an “Ancient Astronauts” tale.
Those who question the Bible or treat the Mesopotamian texts as just
myths have sought to explain the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah
as some natural calamity, yet the biblical version confirms twice
that the “upheaval” by “fire and sulfur” was not a natural calamity
but a premeditated, postponable and even cancellable event: once
when Abraham bargained with The Lord to spare the cities so as not
to destroy the righteous with the unjust, and again when his nephew
Lot obtained a postponement of the upheaval.
Photographs of the Sinai Peninsula from space (Fig. 34) still show
the immense cavity and the crack in the surface where the nuclear
explosion had taken place. The area itself is strewn, to this day,
with crushed, burnt, and blackened rocks (Fig. 35); they contain a
highly unusual ratio of isotope uranium-235, indicating in expert
opinions exposure to sudden immense heat of nuclear origin.
The upheaval of the cities in the plain of the Dead Sea caused the
southern shore of the sea to collapse, leading to a flooding of the
once fertile area and its appearance, to this day, as an appendage
separated from the sea by a barrier called “El-Lissan” (“The
Tongue”) (Fig. 36).
Figure 34
Figure 35
Figure 36
Attempts by Israeli archaeologists to
explore the seabed there have revealed the existence of enigmatic
underwater ruins, but the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in whose half
of the Dead Sea the ruins are, put a stop to further exploration.
Interestingly, the relevant Mesopotamian texts confirm the
topographic change and even suggest that the sea became a Dead Sea
as a result of the nuclear bombing.
Erra, they tell,
“Dug
through the sea, its wholeness he divided; that which lives in it,
even the crocodiles, he made wither.”
The two, as it turned out, did more than destroy the spaceport and
the sinning cities: as a result of the
nuclear explosions,
A storm, the Evil Wind,
went around in the skies.
And the chain reaction of unintended consequences began.
The historical records show that the Sumerian civilization collapsed
in the sixth year of the reign in Ur of Ibbi-Sin— in 2024 b.c.e. It
was, the reader will recall, the very year in which Abraham was
ninety-nine years old...
Scholars assumed at first that Sumer’s capital, Ur, was overrun by
“barbarian invaders”; but no evidence for such a destructive
invasion was found. A text titled “A Lamentation Over the
Destruction of Ur” was then discovered; it puzzled the scholars, for
it bewailed not the physical destruction of Ur but its
“abandonment”: the gods who had dwelt there abandoned it, the people
who dwelt there were gone, its stables were empty; the temples, the
houses, the sheepfolds remained intact—standing, but empty.
Other lamentation texts were then discovered. They lamented not just
Ur, but all of Sumer. Again they spoke of “abandonment”: not only
did the gods of Ur, Nannar, and Ningal abandon Ur; Enlil, “the wild
bull,” abandoned his beloved temple in Nippur; his spouse Ninlil was
also gone.
Ninmah abandoned her city Kesh; Inanna, “the queen of
Erech,” abandoned Erech; Ninurta forsook his temple Eninnu; his
spouse Bau was also gone from Lagash. One Sumerian city after
another was listed as having been “abandoned,” without their gods,
people, or animals. The scholars were now puzzling over some “dire
catastrophe,” a mysterious calamity that affected the whole of
Sumer.
What could it be?
The answer to the puzzle was right there in those texts: Gone with the wind.
No, this is not a play of words on the title of a famous book/movie. That was the refrain in the Lamentation Texts:
Enlil has
abandoned his temple, he was “gone by the wind.” Ninlil from her
temple was “gone by the wind.” Nannar has abandoned Ur—his
sheepfolds were “gone by the wind”; and so on and on.
The scholars
have assumed that this repetition of the words was a literary
device, a refrain that the lamenters repeated over and over again to
highlight their grief. But that was no literary device—that was the
literal truth: Sumer and its cities were literally emptied as a
result of a wind.
An “Evil Wind,” the lamentation (and then other texts) reported,
came blowing and caused “a calamity, one unknown to men, to befall
the land.”
It was an Evil Wind that “caused cities to be desolate,
caused houses to be desolate, caused stalls to be desolate, the
sheepfolds to be emptied.” There was desolation, but no destruction;
emptiness, but no ruins: the cities were there, the houses were
there, the stalls and sheepfolds were there—but nothing alive
remained; even,
“Sumer’s rivers flow with water that is bitter, the
once cultivated fields grow weeds, in the meadows the plants have
withered.”
All life is gone. It was a calamity that had never
happened before—
On the Land Sumer a calamity fell,
One unknown to men.
One that had never been seen before,
One which could not be withstood.
Carried by the Evil Wind, it was a death from which there was no
escape: it was a death,
“which roams the street, is let loose in the
road... The highest wall, the thickest wall, it passes like a
flood; no door can shut it out, no bolt can turn it back.”
Those who
hid behind doors were felled inside; those who ran to the rooftops
died on the roofs. It was an unseen death:
“It stands beside a man,
yet no one can see it; when it enters a house, its appearance is
unknown.”
It was a gruesome death:
“Cough and phlegm weakened the
chest, the mouth was filled with spittle, dumbness and daze have
come upon them... an overwhelming dumbness... a headache.”
As
the Evil Wind clutched its victims,
“their mouths were drenched with
blood.”
The dead and dying were everywhere.
The texts make clear that the Evil Wind, “bearing gloom from city to
city,” was not a natural calamity; it resulted from a deliberate
decision of the great gods.
It was caused by,
“a great storm ordered
by Anu, a [decision] from the heart of Enlil.”
And it was the result
of a single event—“spawned in a single spawning, in a lightning
flash”—an event that occurred far away in the west:
“From the midst
of the mountains it had come, from the Plain of No-Pity it had come... Like a bitter venom of the gods, from the west it had come.”
That the cause of the Evil Wind was
the nuclear “upheaval” back in
and near the Sinai peninsula was made clear when the texts asserted
that the gods knew its source and cause—a blast, an explosion:
An evil blast heralded the baleful storm,
An evil blast was its forerunner.
Mighty offspring, valiant sons,
were the heralds of the pestilence.
The authors of the lamentation texts, the gods themselves, left us a
vivid record of what had taken place. As soon as the Awesome Weapons
were launched from the skies by Ninurta and Nergal,
“they spread
awesome rays, scorching everything like fire.”
The resulting storm,
“in a flash of lightning was created.” A “dense cloud that brings
doom”—a nuclear “mushroom”—then rose to the sky, followed by
“rushing wind gusts... a tempest that scorches the heavens.”
It
was a day not to be forgotten:
On that day,
When heaven was crushed
and the Earth was smitten,
its face obliterated by the maelstrom—
When the skies were darkened
and covered as with a shadow—
On that day the Evil Wind was born.
The various texts kept attributing the venomous maelstrom to the
explosion at the “place where the gods ascend and descend”—to the
obliteration of the spaceport, rather than to the destruction of the
“sinning cities.”
It was there, “in the midst of the mountains,”
that the nuclear mushroom cloud arose in a brilliant flash—and it
was from there that the prevailing winds, coming from the
Mediterranean Sea, carried the poisonous nuclear cloud eastward,
toward Sumer, and there it caused not destruction but a silent
annihilation, bringing death by nuclear poisoned air to all that
lives.
It is evident from all the relevant texts that, with the possible
exception of Enki, who had protested and warned against the use of
the Awesome Weapons, none of the gods involved expected the eventual
outcome.
Most of them were Earthborn, and to them
the tales of the
nuclear wars on Nibiru were Tales of the Elders.
Did Anu, who should
have known better, think perhaps that the weapons, hidden so long
ago, would hardly work or not work at all? Did Enlil and Ninurta
(who had come from Nibiru) assume that the winds, if at all, would
blow the nuclear cloud toward the desolate deserts that are now
Arabia?
There is no satisfactory answer; the texts only state that
“the great gods paled at the storm’s immensity.”
But it is clear
that as soon as the direction of the winds and the intensity of the
nuclear venom were realized, an alarm was sounded for those in the
wind’s path—gods and people alike—to run for their lives.
The panic, fear, and confusion that overtook Sumer and its cities as
the alarm was sounded are vividly described in a series of
lamentation texts, such as:
...and others.
As far as the gods were concerned, it
appears that it was by and large “each man for himself ”; using
their varied craft, they took off by air and by water to get out of
the wind’s path.
As for the people, the gods did sound the alarm
before they fled.
As described in The Uruk Lamentation,
“Rise up!
Run away! Hide in the steppe!” the people were told in the middle of
the night.
“Seized with terror, the loyal citizens of Uruk” ran for
their lives, but they were felled by the Evil Wind anyway.
The picture, though, was not identical everywhere. In Ur, the
capital, Nannar/Sin was so incredulous that he refused to believe
that Ur’s fate has been sealed. His long and emotional appeal to his
father Enlil to avert the calamity is recorded in the Ur Lamentation
(which was composed by Ningal, Nannar’s spouse); so is Enlil’s blunt
admission of inevitability:
Ur was granted kingship—
An eternal reign it was not granted...
Unwilling to accept the inevitable and too devoted to the people of
Ur to abandon them, Nannar and Ningal decided to stay put.
It was
daytime when the Evil Wind approached Ur:
“Of that day I still
tremble,” Ningal wrote, “but of that day’s foul smell we did not
flee.” As doomsday came, “a bitter lament was raised in Ur, but of
its foulness we did not flee.”
The divine couple spent the night of
nightmares in the “termite house,” an underground chamber deep
inside their ziggurat. By morning, as the venomous wind “was carried
off from the city,” Ningal realized that Nannar was ill. She hastily
put on garments and had the god carried out and away from Ur, the
city that they loved.
At least another deity was also harmed by the Evil Wind; she was
Ninurta’s spouse Bau, who was alone in Lagash (for her husband was
busy destroying the spaceport). Loved by the people, who called her
“Mother Bau,” she was trained as a healing physician, and just could
not force herself to leave.
The lamentations record that,
“On that
day, the storm caught up with the Lady Bau; as if she was a mortal,
the storm caught up with her.”
It is not clear how badly she was
stricken, but subsequent records from Sumer suggest that she did not
survive long thereafter.
Eridu, Enki’s city, lying farthest to the south, was apparently at
the edge of the Evil Wind’s path. We learn from The Eridu Lament
that Ninki, Enki’s spouse, flew away from the city to a safe haven
in Enki’s African Abzu:
“Ninki, the Great Lady, flying like a bird,
left her city.”
But Enki himself departed from the city only far
enough to get out of the Evil Wind’s way:
“The Lord of Eridu stayed
outside his city... for the fate of his city he wept with bitter
tears.”
Many of Eridu’s citizens followed him, camping in the fields
at a safe distance as they watched—for a day and a half—the storm
“put its hand on Eridu.”
Amazingly, the least affected of all the land’s major centers was
Babylon, for it lay beyond the storm’s northern edge. As the alert
was sounded, Marduk contacted his father to seek advice: What are
the people of Babylon to do? he asked.
Those who can escape should
go north, Enki told him; and in the manner of the two “Angels” who
had advised Lot and his family not to look back when they fled
Sodom, so did Enki instruct Marduk to tell his followers “neither to
turn nor to look back.”
If escape was not possible, the people
should seek shelter underground:
“Get them into a chamber below the
earth, into a darkness,” was Enki’s advice.
Following this advice,
and due to the wind’s direction, Babylon and its people were
unharmed.
As the Evil Wind passed and blew away (its remnants, we learn,
reached the Zagros Mountains farther east), it left Sumer desolate
and prostrate.
“The storm desolated the cities, desolated the
houses.”
The dead, lying where they fell, remained unburied:
“The
dead people, like fat placed in the sun, of themselves melted away.”
In the grazing lands,
“cattle large and small became scarce, all
living creatures came to an end.”
The sheepfolds “were delivered to
the Wind.” The cultivated fields withered:
“On the banks of the
Tigris and the Euphrates only sickly weeds grew, in the swamps the
reeds rotted in a stench.”
“No one treads the highways, no one seeks
out the roads.”
“Oh Temple of Nannar in Ur, bitter is thy desolation!” the
lamentation poems bewailed; “Oh Ningal whose land has perished, make
thy heart like water!”
The city has become a strange city,
how can one now exist?
The house has become a house of tears,
it makes my heart like water.
Ur and its temples have been
delivered to the Wind.
After two thousand years, the great Sumerian civilization was
gone
with the wind.
In recent years archaeologists have been joined by geologists,
climatologists, and other earth sciences experts for
multidisciplinary efforts to tackle the enigma of the abrupt
collapse of Sumer & Akkad at the end of the third millennium
b.c.e.
A trend-setting study was one by an international group of seven
scientists from different disciplines titled, “Climate Change and the
Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea,”
published in the scientific journal Geology in its April 2000 issue.
Their research used radiological and chemical analysis of ancient
dust layers from that period obtained from various Near Eastern
sites, but primarily from the bottom of the Gulf of Oman; their
conclusion was that an unusual climate change in the areas adjoining
the Dead Sea gave rise to dust storms and that the dust—an unusual
“atmospheric mineral dust”—was carried by the prevailing winds over
southern Mesopotamia all the way beyond the Persian Gulf (Fig.
37)—the very pattern of Sumer’s Evil Wind!
Carbon dating of the
unusual “fallout dust” led to the conclusion that it was due to an
“uncommon dramatic event
that occurred near 4025 years before the present.”
That, in other
words, means “near 2025 b.c.e.”—the very 2024
b.c.e. indicated by us!
Figure 37
Interestingly, the scientists involved in that study observed in
their report that “the Dead Sea level fell abruptly by 100 meters at
that time.”
They leave the point unexplained—but obviously the
breach of the Dead Sea’s southern barrier and the flooding of the
Plain, as described by us, explain what had happened.
The scientific journal Science devoted its issue of 27 April 2001 to Paleoclimate worldwide. In a section dealing with the events in
Mesopotamia, it refers to evidence from Iraq, Kuwait, and Syria that
the “widespread abandonment of the alluvial plain” between the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers was due to dust storms “commencing 4025
years B.P.” (“Before the Present”).
The study leaves unexplained the
cause of the abrupt “climate change,” but it adopts the same date
for it: 4025 years before A.D. 2001.
The fateful year, modern science confirms, was 2024 b.c.e.
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