Cities of the Gods

In the earliest form of pictographic writing, the sign SHU.GI also meant shibu (“the seventh”).

The astronomical texts explained:

Paralleling the 7 stations of Marduk’s journey, the planets’ names also bespeak a space flight. The land at the journey’s end was the seventh planet, Earth.

We may never know whether, countless years from now, someone on another planet will find and understand the message drawn on the plaque attached to PIONEER 10. Likewise, one would think it futile to expect to find on Earth such a plaque in reverse—a plaque conveying to Earthlings information regarding the location and the route from the 12th Planet. Yet such extraordinary evidence does exist.

The evidence is a clay tablet found in the ruins of the Royal Library of Nineveh.

Like many of the other tablets, it is undoubtedly an Assyrian copy of an earlier Sumerian tablet. Unlike others, it is a circular disc; and though some cuneiform signs on it are excellently preserved, the few scholars who took on the task of deciphering the tablet ended by calling it “the most puzzling Mesopotamian document.”

In 1912, L.W. King, then curator of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities in the British Museum, made a meticulous copy of the disc, which is divided into 8 segments.

The undamaged portions bear geometric shapes unseen on any other ancient artifact, designed and drawn with considerable precision. They include arrows, triangles, intersecting lines, and even an ellipse—a geometricmathematical curve previously assumed to have been unknown in ancient times.

(Fig. 122)

The unusual and puzzling clay plaque was first brought to the attention of the scientific community in a report submitted to the British Royal Astronomical Society on January 9, 1880. R. H. M. Bosanquet and A. H. Sayce, in one of the earliest discourses on The Babylonian Astronomy, referred to it as a planisphere (the reproduction of a spherical surface as a flat map).

They announced that some of the cuneiform signs on it “suggest measurements … appear to bear some technical meaning.”

The many names of celestial bodies appearing in the eight segments of the plaque clearly established its astronomical character. Bosanquet and Sayce were especially intrigued by the seven “dots” in one segment. They said these might represent the phases of the Moon, were it not for the fact that the dots appeared to run along a line naming the “star of stars” DIL.GAN and a celestial body called APIN.

When the Royal Astronomical Society published a sketch of the planisphere, J. Oppert and P. Jensen improved the reading of some star or planet names. Dr. Fritz Hommel, writing in a German magazine in 1891 (Die Astronomie der Alten Chaldäer), drew attention to the fact that each one of the eight segments of the planisphere formed an angle of 45 degrees, from which he concluded that a total sweep of the skies—all 360 degrees of the heavens—was represented.

He suggested that the focal point marked some location “in the Babylonian skies.” There the matter rested until Ernst F. Weidner, first in an article published in 1912 (Babyloniaca: “Zur Babylonischen Astronomie”) and then in his major textbook Handbuch der Babylonischen Astronomie (1915), thoroughly analyzed the tablet, only to conclude that it did not make sense.

His bafflement was caused by the fact that while the geometric shapes and the names of stars or planets written within the various segments were legible or intelligible (even if their meaning or purpose was unclear), the inscriptions along the lines (running at 45-degree angles to each other) just did not make sense. They were, invariably, a series of repeated syllables in the tablet’s Assyrian language. They ran, for example, thus:

lu bur di lu bur di lu bur di bat bat bat kash kash kash kash alu alu alu alu

Weidner concluded that the plaque was both astronomical and astrological, used as a magical tablet for exorcism, like several other texts consisting of repeated syllables. With this, he laid to rest any further interest in the unique tablet.

But the tablet’s inscriptions assume a completely different aspect if we try to read them not as Assyrian word-signs, but as Sumerian word-syllables; for there can hardly be any doubt that the tablet represents an Assyrian copy of an earlier Sumerian original. When we look at one of the segments (which we can number I), its meaningless syllables

na na na na a na a na nu (along the descending line) sha sha sha sha sha sha (along the circumference) sham sham bur kur Kur (along the horizontal line)

literally spring to meaningfulness if we enter the Sumerian meaning of these word-syllables. (Fig. 123)

What unfolds here is a route map, marking the way by which the god Enlil “went by the planets,” accompanied by some operating instructions. The line inclined at 45 degrees appears to indicate the line of a spaceship’s descent from a point which is “high high high high,” through “vapor clouds” and a lower zone that is vaporless, toward the horizon point, where the skies and the ground meet.

In the skies near the horizontal line, the instructions to the astronauts make sense: They are told to “set set set” their instruments for the final approach; then, as they near the ground, “rockets rockets” are fired to slow the craft, which apparently should be raised (“piled up”) before reaching the landing point because it has to pass over high or rugged terrain (“mountain mountain”).

The information provided in this segment clearly pertains to a space voyage by Enlil himself. In this first segment we are given a precise geometric sketch of two triangles connected by a line that turns at an angle.

The line represents a route, for the inscription clearly states that the sketch shows how the “deity Enlil went by the planets.”

The starting point is the triangle on the left, representing the farther reaches of the solar system; the target area is on the right, where all the segments converge toward the landing point.

The triangle on the left, drawn with its base open, is akin to a known sign in Near Eastern pictographic writing; its meaning can be read as “the ruler’s domain, the mountainous land.” The triangle on the right is identified by the inscription shu-ut il Enlil (“Way of god Enlil”); the term, as we know, denotes Earth’s northern skies.

The angled line, then, connects what we believe to have been the 12th Planet—“the ruler’s domain, the mountainous land”—with Earth’s skies. The route passes between two celestial bodies—Dilgan and Apin.

Some scholars have maintained that these were names of distant stars or parts of constellations. If modern manned and unmanned spacecraft navigate by obtaining a “fix” on predetermined bright stars, a similar navigational technique for the Nefilim cannot be ruled out. Yet the notion that the two names stand for such faraway stars somehow does not agree with the meaning of their names: DIL.CAN meant, literally, “the first station”; and APIN, “where the right course is set.”

The meanings of the names indicate way stations, points passed by. We tend to agree with such authorities as Thompson, Epping, and Strassmaier, who identified Apin as the planet Mars. If so, the meaning of the sketch becomes clear: The route between the Planet of Kingship and the skies above Earth passed between Jupiter (“the first station”) and Mars (“where the right course is set”).