Prologue

Mr. Sitchin’s words will appear in quotation marks (" "). Quotation marks within quotation marks indicate Mr. Sitchin is quoting others.

May I remind the reader, that this attempt to expose Mr. Z. Sitchin’s work, in my opinion magnificent, is to present his work as it is. No outside comments are required to interpreter his work, letting Mr. Sitchin, interpret Mr. Sitchin.

However, study of the same is a must, and if disagreement arises, then please research through the right sources to produce the right understanding, and so avoid listening unfounded speculations.

I am no scholar, but I am a member of Mankind in search for answers, and I believe Mr. Zecharia Sitchin has set a valuable opening for others to continue in the quest!

Following is an excerpt from the Prologue:

"This book suggests that we are not alone in the 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"

New York, February 1977

A better opening to Zecharia Sitchin’s work could not be found. In his own words he has described the essence of his work. It is in this spirit that his books ought to be read, for the universal Almighty, no matter how you call it is the same spirit in us, non physical, and yet its latency is much felt if we connect!

Please Note: Unquoted sentences are mine, either joining extracts from the book, or a comment in like manner as the above.

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Chapter One
THE ENDLESS BEGINNING

Evolution?

".....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 them 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.

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Chapter Two
THE SUDDEN CIVILIZATION

Rosetta....

" When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these monuments (pyramids, temple-cities half buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called sphinxes). 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 civilizations. Reaching its maturity in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Greece was a late comer rather than an originator.

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

Mr. Z. Sitchin answers this question along his book.

"One of the greatest finds of Akkadian texts were 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 tablets ended with the statement: "23rd tablet: language of Shumer not changed....."

"...Except for mispronouncing the name - it should have been Shumer, not Sumer - Oppert was right (January 1869 Jules Oppert). 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).

"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.

Mr. Sitchin dedicates extensive research on the subsequent findings, and has included graphics of seals, cuneiform writings, clay tablets, and pictures in his book. These speak of the rulers of Sumer and their customs as a civilization.

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

The Sumerians invented writing and printing, the forerunner of our rotary presses, the cylinder seal.

More than with the divine and spiritual they concerned themselves with crops, measuring fields, calculating prices. They had a parallel system of mathematics.

They invented the kiln.
They achieved textile and clothing industries.
They were well achieved in agriculture.
Their culinary art was admirable:

cereals were turned into flour, to produce leavened and unleavened breads, porridges, pastries, cakes, and biscuits. Barley was also fermented to produce beer. Wine was obtained from grapes and date palms. Milk was available from sheep, goats, and cows, it was used as beveredge, 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 was considered a delicacy.

"Our admiration for the Sumerian culinary art certainly grows as we come across poems that sing the praises of fine foods. In deed, 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.

Sumerians engaged in deep-water seafaring. They searched for metals, rare woods, and stones, and other materials unobtainable in Sumer. The wheel was first used in Sumer, being the first for using ox and horse power. Following are some "firsts" attributed to Sumerians (from a book by Samuel N. Kramer, one of the great Sumerologists), these are quoted by Mr. Sitchin in his own book:

first schools
first bicameral congress
first historian
first pharmacopaeia
first farmer’s almanac
first cosmogony and cosmology
first "Job"
first proverbs and sayings
first library debates
first "Noah"
first library catalogue
first Man’s Heroic Age
first law code and social reforms
first medicine, agriculture and search for world peace and harmony.

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

Following are some sayings regarding Law and Justice:

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 there was music in the earlier Assirio-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 stated 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"

"........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 conclusions 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.

Finding the First Temple Dedicated To Enki...

"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 Zagron 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 eye-lids, 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.

"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 Uquir) 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 astonishing 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."

I sincerely believe that Mr. Sitchin has chosen the order of the chapters in "The 12^th Planet" in a splendid manner. First he has showed us, through vast research, that the people of Sumeria were not much different than we are today. But most important they showed feelings, emotions, sorrow, desire to contact the sacred and these may only manifest when reason points to inner self, like in the relationship of the sorrowful mother who composed a lullaby to comfort her son and direct her own petitions high above, for the well being of the child.

I believe these perceptions of Mr. Sitchin are vital to offer the complete picture of what is to follow.

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Chapter Three
GODS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

The Importance of Number 12

Mr. Sitchin takes the reader through the Greek Olympian gods because through their history it is confirmed that the Greek never claimed that their gods came from the heavens. (Rather, they arrived from other lands with traditions and religion). Zeus arrived from the Mediterranean, via Crete. Aphrodite, 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 from the lands of the Bible. And it is in the Mediterranean Island that Mr. Sitchin looks for the origin of the Greek gods and their astral relationship with the number 12.

It is known that the Olympian gods could not exceed 12 in number, nor be less than 12 in number. The Hittites of the Old Testament also practiced this system of no more and no less than 12 gods of Heaven and Earth.

Mr. Sitchin also studies the Hindu system of the ancients and finds a similarity. To read "The 12^th Planet" is a must to be able to appreciate and understand the correlation.

"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?

".....It was summed up by one of the tenths 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?

Over the years, startling evidence has been unearthed!

THE BULL AND THE CROSS.-

"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.

THE "GOGGLES".-

"The archaeological find 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 eyes goggles. It frequently appeared on round seals as part of a rocket-like object.

"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 premortal 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.

(The epic tale is very extensive, suffice to say that in it are all the names mentioned below by Mr. Sitchin and more).

"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 scripts to denote their identities. Also, some of the places named in the action were those of ancient Sumerian sites.

Mr. Sitchin has taken care of researching also how the Hittites inherited the Sumerian knowledge, the language was studied at Hattu-Shash (the capital city) and Sumerian-Hittite vocabularies were found there.

The bridge were a people called the Hurrians. The Old Testament refers to them as the Horites (free people), the Egyptians referred to their kingdom as the Mitanni. There is confirmation now that they were the Aryans. (Mr. Sitchin gives a vast explanation about this in his book)

It was the Hurrians who absorbed and transmitted the religion of Sumer. This was obvious from the frequent use of the original Sumerian divine names, epithets, and writing signs. Even the Hurrian duplicated Sumerian art, its form, its themes, and its symbols.

There is evidence that the Hurrians were present in Sumeria in the third millennium B.C., that they held important positions in Sumer in the last period of glory, that of the third dynasty of Ur.

"Over the years, startling evidence has been unearthed...."

Sumerian Father of the Gods....
Another Symbol "the Winged Star"
EL, the "lofty deity"....

"In the thirteenth century B.C., under the presence 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 Urarty ("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, as we shall see, was the Sumerian Father of the Gods.

"......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.

".....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 the personal name of the god and the generic term meaning "lofty deity."

"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.

The Winged Star, is a circle in which an eight point star is enclosed and wings sprang opened from the circle’s each side.

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

"The Egyptians believed in Gods of Heaven and 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 subjected 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.

"......Ra was an unseen celestial god who manifested himself only periodically. His manifestation was the ATEN - the Celestial Disc, depicted as a Winged Globe.

Symbol.- The ATEN was a blank circle with wings spanning from each side. Ra had two sons, Osiris and Seth. Horus, son of Osiris is represented sometimes as a winged and horned deity. Obviously as representation of the Kingdom from Ra.

"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.

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.

"In the 1980’s 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 earlier remains included a step pyramid and temples to the Sumerian deities Inanna, Ninhursag, and Enlil.

"Who were these Gods of Heaven and Earth, divine yet human, always headed by a pantheon of inner circle and 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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Chapter Four
SUMER: LAND OF THE GODS
 

Anu, Head of the Family of Gods.... His Symbol

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 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."

Symbol.- The star was an eight point star for "An = star."

An eight point star was also for "heaven", but with four of its arms (from top) to its left like a sector shape (fan).
A cross with a small inverted triangle on the top arm and with two small triangles (one above the other) to its left arm, was for "god."

"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.

".....Anu had a spouse ANTU.

"A tablet that belonged to an archive at Uruk enlightens us to the pomp and pageantry that accompany the arrival of Anu and his spouse on a "state visit." Because of damage to a tablet, we can read of the ceremonies only from some midpoint, when Anu 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.

Many activities would follow.

"While an "evening meal"- various drinks and appetizers - were 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."

Among other activities of preparation:

"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 from 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 will 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.

"By Sumerian tradition, rulership flowed from Anu; and the very term for "Kingship" was Anutu (Anu-ship). The insignia of Anu were the tiaria (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.

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