"That Mankind's progression from Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age)
to Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) to Neolithic (New Stone Age) and then the great Sumerian civilization, had occurred in intervals of about 3600 years is a fact.
That Anu visited Earth, approved the grant of civilization (knowledge, science, technology) to Mankind is certain.
But as I have tried to explain in my recent Seminars (though not yet in a full length book), the visits to Earth and the nearing (at what is called perihelion) of Nibiru do NOT coincide.
This is a point of immense significance, which those who have only read
my first book somehow ignore."
Sitchin
Excerpted and edited from
"Interview with Zecharia Sitchin"
from CONNECTING LINK
issue 17
Zecharia Sitchin was born in Russia and raised in Palestine,
where he acquired a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew,
other Semitic and European languages, the Old Testament, and the
history and archeology of the Near East.
He is one of the few scholars who is able to read and understand Sumerian.
Sitchin
attended and graduated from the University of London, majoring in
economic history. A leading journalist and editor in Israel for many
years, he now lives and writes in New York. His books have been
widely translated, converted to Braille for the blind, and featured
on radio and television.
The first book, THE TWELFTH PLANET, refers to the probability
that there is
one more planet in our solar
system. That there are twelve members, counting sun, moon and ten
planets, not the nine we know of.
That people from that planet came to earth almost half a million years ago and did many of the things about which we read in the Bible, in the book of Genesis.
But that was not my starting point at all.
My starting point was,
going back to my childhood and schooldays, the puzzle of who were the Nephilim, that are mentioned in Genesis, Chapter six,
as the sons of the gods who married the daughters of Man in the days
before the great flood, the Deluge.
The word Nephilim is commonly, or used to be,
translated giants... Those were the days when there were
giants upon the earth. I questioned this interpretation as a child
at school, and I was reprimanded for it because the teacher said
"You don't question the Bible."
But I did not question the Bible; I questioned an interpretation
that seemed inaccurate, because the word, Nephilim (or
Nefilim), the name by which those extraordinary beings, "the
sons of the gods" were known, means literally, "Those who have come
down to earth from the heavens."
So, what did it mean? This led me to biblical studies and then to
mythology and archeology and all the other subjects, including the
study of ancient languages, which became my education and avocation.
So, my research and my decision to write about it started with a
question: Who were
the Nephilim?
All the ancient scriptures, the Bible, the Greek myths, the Egyptian
myth and texts, the pyramid texts, everything, led to the Sumerians,
whose civilization was the first known one -- six thousand years
ago. I focused on Sumer, the source of these legends
and myths and texts and information.
I learned to read the cuneiform
Sumerian texts and came upon their persistent and repeated
statements that those beings, whom the Sumerians called
Anunnaki, came to earth from a planet called
Nibiru.
The planet was designated by the sign of the cross and Nibiru meant
"planet of crossing."
The question thus shifted in my research from who were the Nefilim
and the Anunnaki, to what planet is Nibiru? Forced to become
proficient in astronomy, I had to learn enough about it to deal with
the subject. I found out that the scholars were divided. Some said
it (Nibiru) was Mars, which of course was described and known to the
ancient people, and others said, no, it was Jupiter.
Those who said
it was Jupiter and not Mars, had very convincing arguments why it
could not be Mars. And those who said it was Mars and not Jupiter
had very convincing arguments also.
Being able to go directly to those ancient sources, clay tablets and
cuneiform scripts, it seemed to me that neither was right, because
the description of Nibiru and its position when it nears the Sun
indicated that it could not be Mars, and it could not be Jupiter.
And then one night I woke up with the answer:
Of course, it is one
more planet that comes periodically between Mars and Jupiter; it is
sometimes nearer to Mars and sometimes nearer to Jupiter, but it
isn't Mars or Jupiter.
Once I realized that this was the answer, that there is one more
planet, everything else fell into place. The meaning of the
Mesopotamian Epic of Creation on which the first chapters of Genesis
are based and all details about the Anunnaki, who they were, who
their leaders were, how they traveled from their planet to Earth,
and how they splashed down in the Persian Gulf and about their first
settlement, their leaders and so on and so on everything became
clear! The Sumerians had immense knowledge.
They knew about Uranus
and Neptune and described them, and they knew about Pluto. They were
proficient in mathematics and, in many respects, their knowledge
surpassed modern times. They said, "All that we know was told to us
by the Anunnaki."
The first book's innovation, its impact, was the realization that
the ancient peoples, beginning with the Sumerians, knew of and
described and spoke of one more planet in our solar system. It was
not a discovery like that of Pluto in the 1930s (of which the
Sumerians knew six thousand years ago).
Pluto was a very interesting
astronomical discovery; textbooks had to be revised. But to the
average person, the man on the street, it really made no difference.
Nibiru, on the other hand was a different story. If
Niburu exists,
(and this is the planet that astronomers nowadays call Planet X)
then the Anunnaki exist.
So the existence of Nibiru is not a matter of just one more globe in
our solar system. This is different, because if Nibiru exists, and
the Anunnaki exist, then the Sumerian claim that they come back to
our vicinity every 3,600 years, at which times in the past they gave
us civilization, then we are not alone and there are more advanced
people than us in our solar system.
Who knows how they will feel about us when they come back? Will they
decide to give us more knowledge again, and more technical
advancement and more civilization, or will they decide that we are
no good, as happened at the time of the Deluge, and try to get rid
of us?
Book five, Genesis Revisted, a companion book, was really written
because in the fifteen years since the first book was published,
there have been many scientific advances, especially in astronomy
and all the discoveries of the Voyager Spacecraft, in geology,
biology, the discovery of DNA, the ability to create babies in a
test tube, linguistics, and [in unlocking the secrets of] the origin
of languages.
Each such discovery corroborated what the Sumerians
had known and had written, and therefore fully confirmed what I said
in my first book. And each time there was such a discovery I would
literally jump out of my seat and say, "My god, this is exactly what
the Sumerians said six-thousand years ago!"
If you read the relevant page in the Twelfth Planet, you will see
that I quote a Sumerian text that says exactly how the Adam, the
first Homo sapiens, was created. You will see that this is a process
that today we call the test tube baby process. I quote a text that
describes Uranus and Neptune as Voyager 2 saw them in 1986 and 1989.
I finally sat down and put together all this scientific evidence,
all these scientific discoveries to show how they match and
corroborate ancient knowledge. Hence the subtitle of Genesis
Revisited: Is Modern Science Catching Up With Ancient Knowledge? So,
this is a review of the five books.
The knowledge that we have acquired corroborates what the Sumerians
knew six thousand years ago. You wonder how is it possible, how
could they know?
How, as another example, could their symbol of the
entwined serpents, that we still use today to denote medicine and
healing and biology have been, 6,000 years ago, the symbol of Enki,
who engaged in genetic engineering to bring about the Adam? That was
a symbol of their DNA, the double helix of DNA.
Now, who were the Anunnaki and where were they from?
The Sumerians say,
"They came here from Nibiru."
And you say,
"What is Nibiru?"
So they say,
"It is one more planet in our solar system."
Now, if you say,
"I'm really impressed by the Sumerian knowledge, and, maybe they knew what they were talking about regarding the Anunnaki. But I don't think there is another planet with these advanced beings on it near Earth."
If so, what is your explanation of who Anunnaki were? Was there really a race of giants who existed on Earth half a million years ago? Do you believe there was a civilization on Earth half a million years ago that surpassed our own and disappeared?
When the focus shifts to explaining those other people, you have no
explanation. I then say, if you have no explanation, why not accept
the word of the Sumerians?
The second aspect of the answer is this. Nowhere in all these books
do I use a text, or do I refer to a tablet and say,
"I went to this or that place in the Near East and as I was visiting that place, I shifted the soil with my foot or with a stick and look what I found! I found this tablet and look what it says! It says that there was somebody called Enki who traveled from Nibiru to Earth and splashed down in the Persian Gulf."
No, nowhere do I say,
"Look what I found."
All the time I say,
"There is a tablet in the British Museum, its catalog number is such and such; it was discovered in this and this place; the text was first published by this and this scholar, here is what it says."
All the information, all the sources that I am giving, are academically, scientifically, scholarly known and accepted sources.
At no time do I invent my own source