The Abzu Underworld

The events show that the Underworld was not a Land of the Dead. Instead, it was a place:

• the gods could enter and leave
• of lovemaking
• important enough to be entrusted to a granddaughter of Enlil and a son of Enki.

The place was far and difficult to reach, and a somewhat “restricted area” but hardly a “place of no return.”

Like Inanna, other leading deities were reported going to, and returning from, this Lower World.

Enlil was banished to the Abzu for a while, after he had raped Ninlil.

Ea was a virtual commuter between Eridu in Sumer and the Abzu, bringing to the Abzu “the craftsmanship of Eridu” and establishing in it “a lofty shrine” for himself.

Far from being a dark and desolate place, it was described as a bright place with flowing waters.

We have seen the many depictions of Ea as the God of Flowing Waters. Such flowing waters existed—not in Sumer and its flatlands, but in the Great Below.

W. F. Albright drew attention to a text dealing with the Lower World as the Land of UT.TU—“in the west” of Sumer. It speaks of a journey of Enki to the Apsu:

By all accounts, the place lay beyond a sea.

A lament for “the pure son,” the young Dumuzi, reports that he was carried off to the Lower World in a ship. A “Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer” describes how Inanna managed to sneak aboard a waiting ship. “From her possessions she sailed forth. She descends to the Lower World.”

A long text, little understood because no intact version has been found, deals with some major dispute between Ira (Nergal’s title as Lord of the Lower World) and his brother Marduk.

In the course of the dispute, Nergal left his domain and confronted Marduk in Babylon; Marduk, on the other hand, threatened:

“To the Apsu will I descend, the Anunnaki to supervise… my raging weapons against them I will raise.”

To reach the Apsu, he left the Land of Mesopotamia and traveled over “waters that rose up.”

His destination was Arali in the “basement” of Earth, and the texts provide a precise clue as to where this “basement” was:

The beru, both a land-measuring and a time-reckoning unit, was probably used in the latter capacity when travel over water was involved.

As such it was a double hour, so that 100 beru meant two hundred hours of sailing. We have no way of determining the assumed or average sailing speed employed in these ancient distance reckonings. But there is no doubt that a truly distant land was reached after a sea voyage of over 2-3 thousand miles.

The texts indicate that Arali was situated west and south of Sumer. A ship traveling 2-3 thousand miles in a southwesterly direction from the Persian Gulf could have only one destination: the shares of southern Africa.

Only such a conclusion can explain the terms Lower World, as meaning the southern hemisphere, where the Land of Arali was, as contrasted with the Upper World, or northern hemisphere, where Sumer was.

Such a division of Earth’s hemispheres between Enlil (northern) and Ea (southern) paralleled the designation of the northern skies as the Way of Enlil and the southern skies as the Way of Ea.

The ability of the Nefilim to undertake interplanetary travel, orbit Earth, and land on it should obviate the question whether they could possibly have known of southern Africa, besides Mesopotamia.

Many cylinder seals, depicting animals peculiar to the area (such as the zebra or ostrich), jungle scenes, or rulers wearing leopard skins in the African tradition, attest to an “African connection.”

What interest did the Nefilim have in this part of Africa, diverting to it the scientific genius of Ea and granting to the important gods in charge of the land a unique “Tablet of Wisdom”?

The Sumerian term AB.ZU means “watery deep”. Literally, it meant “primeval deep source”—not necessarily of waters.*

According to Sumerian grammatical rules, either of two syllables of any term could precede the other without changing the word’s meaning, with the result that AB.ZU and ZU.AB meant the same thing.

The latter spelling of the Sumerian term enables identification of its parallel in the Semitic languages, for za-ab has always meant and still means “precious metal,” specifically “gold,” in Hebrew and its sister languages.

The Sumerian pictograph for AB.ZU was that of an excavation deep into Earth, mounted by a shaft. Thus, Ea was not the lord of an indefinite “watery deep,” but the god in charge of the exploitation of Earth’s minerals! (Fig. 139)

In fact, the Greek abyssos, adopted from the Akkadian apsu, also meant an extremely deep hole in the ground. Akkadian textbooks explained that “apsu is nikbu”; the meaning of the word and that of its Hebrew equivalent nikba is very precise: a deep, man-made cutting or drilling into the ground.

P. Jensen (Die Kosmologie der Babylonier) observed back in 1890 that the oftencountered Akkadian term Bit Nimiku should not be translated as “house of wisdom” but as “house of deepness.”

He quoted a text (V.R30, 49–50ab) that stated: “It is from Bit Nimiku that gold and silver come.”

Another text (III.R57, 35ab), he pointed out, explained that the Akkadian name “Goddess Shala of Nimiki” was the translation of the Sumerian epithet “Goddess Who Hands the Shining Bronze.”

The Akkadian term nimiku, which has been translated as “wisdom,” Jensen concluded, “had to do with metals.” But why, he admitted simply, “I do not know.”

Some Mesopotamian hymns to Ea exalt him as Bel Nimiki, translated “lord of wisdom”; but the correct translation should undoubtedly be “lord of mining.”

Just as the Tablet of Destinies at Nippur contained orbital data, it follows that the Tablet of Wisdom entrusted to Nergal and Ereshkigal was in fact a “Tablet of Mining,” a “data bank” pertaining to the mining operations of the Nefilim.

As Lord of the Abzu, Ea was assisted by another son, the god GI.BlL (“he who burns the soil”), who was in charge of fire and smelting.

Earth’s Smith, he was usually depicted as a young god whose shoulders emit red-hot rays or sparks of fire, emerging from the ground or about to descend into it. The texts state that Gibil was steeped by Ea in “wisdom,” meaning that Ea had taught him mining techniques. (Fig. 140)

The metal ores mined in southeastern Africa by the Nefilim were carried back to Mesopotamia by specially designed cargo ships called MA.GUR UR.NU AB.ZU (“ship for ores of the Lower World”). There, the ores were taken to Bad-Tibira, whose name literally meant “the foundation of metalworking.”

Smelted and refined, the ores were cast into ingots whose shape remained unchanged throughout the ancient world for millennia.

Such ingots were actually found at various Near Eastern excavations, confirming the reliability of the Sumerian pictographs as true depictions of the objects they “wrote” out; the Sumerian sign for the term ZAG (“purified precious”) was the picture of such an ingot. In earlier times it apparently had a hole running through its length, through which a carrying rod was inserted. (Fig. 141)

Several depictions of a God of the Flowing Waters show him flanked by bearers of such precious metal ingots, indicating that he was also the Lord of Mining. (Fig. 142)

The various names and epithets for Ea’s African Land of Mines are replete with clues to its location and nature. It was known as A.RA.LI (“place of the shiny lodes”), the land from which the metal ores come.

Inanna, planning her descent to the southern hemisphere, referred to the place as the land where “the precious metal is covered with soil”—where it is found underground. A text reported by Erica Reiner, listing the mountains and rivers of the Sumerian world, stated:

“Mount Arali: home of the gold”.

A fragmented text described by H. Radau confirmed that Arali was the land on which Bad-Tibira depended for its continued operations.

The Mesopotamian texts spoke of the Land of Mines as mountainous, with grassy plateaus and steppes, and lush with vegetation. The capital of Ereshkigal in that land was described by the Sumerian texts as being in the GAB.KUR.RA (“in the chest of the mountains”), well inland. In the Akkadian version of Ishtar’s journey, the gatekeeper welcomes her:

Conveying in Akkadian the meaning “that which is in the heartland,” the term KU.TU in its Sumerian origin also meant “the bright uplands.” It was a land, all texts suggest, with bright days, awash with sunshine.

The Sumerian terms for gold (KU.GI—“bright out of earth”) and silver (KU.BABBAR—“bright gold”) retained the original association of the precious metals with the bright (ku) domain of Ereshkigal.

The pictographic signs employed as Sumer’s first writing reveal great familiarity not only with diverse metallurgical processes but also with the fact that the sources of the metals were mines dug down into the earth.

The terms for copper and bronze Chandsome-bright stone"), gold (“the supreme mined metal”), or “refined” (“bright-purified”) were all pictorial variants of a mine shaft (“opening/mouth for dark-red” metal). (Fig. 143)

The land’s name, Arali, could also be written as a variant of:

• the pictograph for “dark-red” (soil),
• Kush (“dark-red,” but in time meaning “Negro”), or
• the metals mined there.

The pictographs always depicted variants of a mine shaft. (Fig. 144)