The Earth Chronicles

There are similarities of the genealogies and warfare between the Greek and Hindu gods.

tablets discovered in the Hittite royal archives (at a site nowadays called Boghazkoi) contained more tales of the same story: how. as one generation waned unto the other, one god fought another for supremacy.

The longest texts discovered dealt, as could be expected, with the Hittite supreme deity Teshub: his genealogy; his rightful assumption of dominion over Earth’s upper regions; and the battles launched against him by the god KUMARBI and his offspring. As in the Greek and Egyptian tales, the Avenger of Kumarbi was hidden with the aid of allied gods until he grew up somewhere in a “dark-hued” part of Earth.

The final battles raged in the skies and in the seas; in one battle Teshub was supported by seventy gods riding in their chariots. At first defeated and either hiding or exiled, Teshub finally faced his challenger in god-to-god combat. Armed with the “Thunder-stormer which scatters the rocks for ninety furlongs” and “’the Lightning which flashes frightfully,” he ascended skyward in his chariot, pulled by two gold-plated Bulls of Heaven, and “from the skies he set his face” toward his enemy. Though the fragmented tablets lack the tale’s ending, it is evident that Teshub was finally victorious. Who were these ancient gods, who fought each other for supremacy and sought dominion over Earth by pitting nation against nation?

Fittingly, perhaps, treaties that had ended some of the very wars launched by men for their gods provide important clues. When the Egyptians and the Hittites made peace after more than two centuries of warfare, it was sealed by the marriage of the daughter of the Hittite king Hattusilish III to the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II. The Pharaoh recorded the event on commemorative stelae which he placed at Kamak, at Elephantine near Aswan, and at Abu Simbel. Describing the journey and the arrival of the princess in Egypt, the inscription relates that when “His Majesty saw that she was as beautiful of face as a goddess,” he at once fell in love with her and deemed her to be “something lovely granted him by the god Ptah” and a sign of Hittite acknowledgment of his “victory.” What all this diplomatic maneuvering had entailed was clarified by other parts of the inscription: thirteen years earlier, Hattusilish had sent to the Pharaoh the text of a Peace Treaty; but Ramses II, still brooding over his near-fatal experience in the battle of Kadesh, ignored it. “The great Chief of Hatti then wrote appeasingly to His Majesty year after year; but the King Ramses paid no attention.”

Finally, the King of Hatti, instead of sending messages inscribed on tablets, “sent his eldest daughter, preceded by precious tribute” and accompanied by Hittite nobles. Wondering what all these gifts meant, Ramses sent an Egyptian escort to meet and accompany the Hittites. And, as related above, he succumbed to the beauty of the Hittite princess, made her a queen, and named her Maat-Neferu-Ra (“The Beauty Which Ra Sees”).

Our knowledge of history and antiquity has also profited by that love at first sight, for the Pharaoh then accepted the lingering Peace Treaty, and proceeded to inscribe it, too, at Kamak, not far from where the tale of the Battle of Kadesh and the Tale of the Beautiful Hittite Princess had been commemorated. Two copies, one almost complete, the other fragmentary, have been discovered, deciphered, and translated by Egyptologists. As a result we not only have the full text of the Treaty but also know that the Hittite king wrote down the treaty in the Akkadian language, which was then (as French was a century and two ago) the common language of international relations.

To the Pharaoh he sent a copy of the Akkadian original written on a silver tablet, which the Egyptian inscription at Karnak described thus: What is in the middle of the tablet of silver, on the front side: Figures consisting of an image of Seth, embracing an image of the Great Prince of Hatti, surrounded by a border with the words “the seal of Seth, ruler of the sky; the seal of the regulation which Hattusilish made” . . . What is within that which surrounds the image of the seal of Seth on the other side:

Figures consisting of a female image of the goddess of Hatti embracing a female image of the Princess of Hatti, surrounded by a border with the words “the seal of the Ra of the town of Arinna, the lord of the land” . . . What is within the [frame) surrounding the figures: the seal of Ra of Arinna, the lord of every land.

In the royal Hittite archives, archaeologists have in fact discovered royal seals depicting the chief Hittite deity embracing the Hittite king (Fig. 17), exactly as described in the Egyptian record, even including the inscription surrounding the border of the seal. Against all odds, the original treaty itself, inscribed on two tablets in the Akkadian language, was also found in these archives. But the Hittite texts called their chief deity Teshub, not “Seth of Hatti.” Since Teshub meant “Windy Storm.” and Seth (to judge by his Greek name Typhon) meant “Fierce Wind,” it appeared that the Egyptians and Hittites were matching their pantheons according to the epithet-names of their gods. In line with that, Teshub’s spouse HEBAT was called “Lady of the Skies” to parallel the goddess by that title in the Egyptian version of the treaty; Ra (“The Bright One”) was paralleled by a Hittite “Lord of the Sky” whom the Akkadian version called SHAMASH (“The Bright One”), and so on.

The Egyptians and the Hittites, it became evident, were matching separate, but parallel, pantheons; and scholars began to wonder what other ancient treaties would reveal. One that provided surprising information was the treaty made circa 1350 B.C. between the Hittite king Shuppilulima and Mattiwaza, king of the Human kingdom of Mitanni, which was situated on the Euphrates river midway between the Land of the Hittites and the ancient lands of Sumer and Akkad.

Executed as usual in two copies, the treaty’s original was deposited in the shrine of the god Teshub in the Human city Kahat—a place and a tablet lost in the sands of time. But the duplicate tablet, deposited in the Hittite holy city of Arinna “in front of the goddess of the Rising Disc,” was discovered by archaeologists some 3,300 years after it was written!

The treaty between the Hittite and Mitannian kings ended with a call upon “the gods of the contracting parties to be present, to listen and to serve as witnesses,” so that adherence to the treaty shall bring divine bliss, and its violation the wrath of the gods. These “gods of the contracting parties” were then listed, beginning with Teshub and his consort Hebat as the supreme reigning gods of both kingdoms, the gods “who regulate kingship and queenship” in Hatti and Mitanni and in whose shrines the copies of the treaty were deposited.

Then, a number of younger deities, both male and female, offspring of the two reigning gods, were listed by the provincial capitals where they acted as governing deities, representing their parents. Here, then, was a listing of the very same gods in the very same hierarchical positions; unlike the Egyptian instance, when different pantheons were being matched. As other discovered texts proved, the Hittite pantheon was in fact borrowed from (or through) the Humans. But this particular treaty held a special surprise: toward the end of the tablet, among the divine witnesses, there were also listed Mitra-ash. Uruwana, Indar, and the Nashatiyanu gods—the very Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatya gods of the Hindu pantheon!

Which of the three—Hittite, Hindu, Human—was then the common source? The answer was provided in the same HittiteMitannian treaty: none of them; for those so-called “Aryan” gods were listed in the treaty together with their parents and grandparents, the “Olden Gods”: the couples Anu and Antu, Enlil and his spouse Ninlil, Ea and his wife Damkina; as well as “the divine Sin, lord of the oath . . . Nergal of Kutha … the warrior god Ninurta … the warlike Ishtar.” These are familiar names; they had been invoked in earlier days by Sargon of Akkad, who had claimed that he was “Overseer of Ishtar, anointed priest of Anu, great righteous shepherd of Enlil.”

His grandson Naram-Sin (“Whom the god Sin loves”) could attack the Cedar Mountain when the god Nergal “opened the path” for him. Hammurabi of Babylon marched against other lands “on the command of Anu, with Enlil advancing in front of the army.” The Assyrian king Tiglat-Pileser went conquering on the command of Anu, Adad, and Ninurta; Shalmaneser fought with weapons provided by Nergal; Esarhaddon was accompanied by Ishtar on his march to Nineveh.

No less illuminating was the discovery that the Hittites and the Hurrians. though they pronounced the deities’ names in their own language, wrote the names employing Sumerian script; even the “divine” determinative used was the Sumerian DIN.GIR, literally meaning “The Righteous Ones” (DIN) “Of the Rocketship” (GIR). Thus the name of Teshub was written DIN. GIR IM (“Divine Stormer”), which was the Sumerian name for the god ISHKUR, also known as Adad; or it was written DIN.GIR U, meaning “The god 10,” which was the numerical rank of Ishkur/Adad—that of Anu being the highest (60), that of Enlil 50, that of Ea 40, and so on down the line. Also, like the Sumerian Ishkur/Adad, Teshub was depicted by the Hittites brandishing his lightning-emitting weapon, a “Weapon of Brilliance” (Fig. 18).

Fig. 18

By the time the Hittites and their writings were reclaimed from oblivion, scholars had already determined that before the Hittite and Egyptian civilizations, before Assyria and Babylon, even before Akkad, there arose in southern Mesopotamia the high civilization of Sumer. All the others were offshoots of that first-known civilization.

The tales of gods and men were first recorded in Sumer. I call them THE EARTH CHRONICLES.

The discovery and understanding of the ancient civilizations has been a process of continuous astonishment, of incredible realizations. The monuments of antiquity—pyramids, ziggurats, vast platforms, columned ruins, carved stones—would have remained enigmas, mute evidence to bygone events, were it not for the Written Word. Were it not for that, the ancient monuments would have remained puzzles: their age uncertain; their creators obscure; their purpose unclear.

In place after place—in centers of commerce or of administration, in temples and palaces, in all parts of the ancient Near East— there were both state and private archives full of such tablets; and there were also actual libraries where the tablets, tens of thousands of them, were neatly arranged by subject, their contents entitled, their scribe named, their sequel numbered. Invariably, whenever they dealt with history or science or the gods, they were identified as copies of earlier tablets, tablets in the “olden language.”

Astounded as the archaeologists were to uncover the grandeur of Assyria and Babylonia, they were even more puzzled to read in their inscriptions of “olden cities.” And what was the meaning of the title “king of Sumer and Akkad” that the kings of these empires coveted so much?

It was only with the discovery of the records concerning Sargon of Agade that modern scholars were able to convince themselves that a great kingdom, the Kingdom of Akkad, had indeed arisen in Mesopotamia half a millennium before Assyria and Babylonia were to flourish. It was with the greatest amazement that scholars read in these records that Sargon “defeated Uruk and tore down its wall. . . . Sargon, king of Agade, was victorious over the inhabitants of Ur. … He defeated E-Nimmar and tore down its wall and defeated its territory from Lagash as far as the sea. His weapons he washed in the sea. In the battle with the inhabitants of Umma he was victorious. . . .”

There were urban centers, walled cities in Sumer, even before Sargon of Agade. even before 2500 B.C.

Suddenly and inexplicably out of nowhere, there appeared a written language and literature; kings and priests; schools and temples; doctors and astronomers; high-rise buildings, canals, docks, and ships; an intensive agriculture; an advanced metallurgy; a textile industry; trade and commerce; laws and concepts of justice and morality; cosmological theories; and tales and records of history and prehistory.

In all these writings, be it long epic tales or two-line proverbs, in inscriptions mundane or divine, the same facts emerge as an unshakable tenet of the Sumerians and the peoples that followed them: in bygone days, the DIN.GIR—“The Righteous Ones of the Rocketships,” the beings the Greeks began to call “gods”—had come to Earth from their own planet.

They chose southern Mesopotamia to be their home away from home. They called the land KI.EN.GIR—“Land of the Lord of the Rockets” (the Akkadian name, Shumer, meant “Land of the Guardians”); and they established there the first settlements on Earth. The statement that the first to establish settlements on Earth were astronauts from another planet was not lightly made by the Sumerians. In text after text, whenever the starting point was recalled, it was always this: 432,000 years before the Deluge, the DIN.GIR (“Righteous Ones of the Rocketships”) came down to Earth from their own planet.

The Sumerians considered it a twelfth member of our Solar System—a system made up of the Sun in the center, the Moon, all the nine planets we know of today, and one more large planet whose orbit lasts a Sar, 3,600 Earth-years.

This orbit, they wrote, takes the planet to a “station” in the distant heavens, then brings it back to Earth’s vicinity, crossing between Mars and Jupiter. It was in that position—as depicted in a 4,500-year-old Sumerian drawing (Fig. 19) that the planet obtained its name NIBIRU (“Crossing”) and its symbol, the Cross. The leader of the astronauts who had come to Earth from Nibiru, we know from numerous ancient texts, was called E. A (“Whose House Is Water”); after he had landed and established Eridu, the first Earth Station, he assumed the title EN.KI (“Lord of Earth”). A text that was discovered in the ruins of Sumer records his landing on Earth as a first-person report:

When I approached Earth there was much flooding. When I approached its green meadows, heaps and mounds were piled up at my command. I built my house in a pure place . . . My house—its shade stretches over the Snake Marsh.

The text then proceeds to describe Ea’s efforts to build extraordinary waterworks in the marshlands at the head of the Persian Gulf: He surveyed the marshlands, cut canals for drainage and water control, built dykes, dug ditches, and built structures of bricks molded from the local clays. He joined the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by canals; and at the edge of the marshlands he built his Water House, with a wharf and other facilities. It all had a reason. On his planet gold was needed.

Not for jewelry or another frivolous use, for at no time during the millennia that followed were these visitors to Earth ever shown wearing golden jewelry. Gold was. no doubt, required for the space programs of the Nibiruans, as is evident from the Hindu texts’ references to the celestial chariots being covered with gold; indeed, gold is vital to many aspects of the space instruments and vehicles of our own times. But that alone could not have been the reason for the intensity of the Nibiruans’ search for gold on Earth and their immense efforts to obtain it here and transfer it in large quantities to their own planet. The metal, with its unique properties, was needed back home for a vital need, affecting the very survival of life on that planet; as best as we can make out, this vital need could have been for suspending the gold particles in Nibiru’s waning atmosphere and thus shield it from critical dissipation. A son of Nibiru’s ruler, Ea was well chosen for the mission.

He was a brilliant scientist and engineer whose nickname was NU.DIM.MUD, “He Who Fashions Things.” The plan, as his epithet-name E.A. indicated, was to extract the gold from the waters of the quiet Persian Gulf and the adjoining shallow marshlands that extended from the gulf into Mesopotamia. Sumerian depictions showed Ea as lord of the flowing waters, sitting in a laboratory and surrounded by interconnected flasks (Fig. 20). But the unfolding tale suggests that all was not going well with this scheme. The gold production was far below expectations, and to speed it up, more astronauts—the rank and file were called Anunnaki (“Those Who From Heaven to Earth Came”)—landed on Earth.

They came in groups of fifty, and one of the texts reveals that one of these groups was led by Enki’s firstborn son MAR.DUK. The text records Marduk’s urgent message to his father describing a near-calamity on the flight to Earth, as the spaceship passed by one of the Solar System’s large planets (probably Jupiter) and almost collided with one of that planet’s satellites. Describing the “attack” on the spacecraft, the excited Marduk told his father;

Fig. 20

It has been created like a weapon; It has charged forward like death . . . The Anunnaki who are fifty it has smitten . . . The flying, birdlike Supreme Orbiter it has smitten on the breast. A Sumerian engraving on a cylinder seal (Fig. 21) may well have illustrated the scene of Lord Earth (on the left) anxiously greeting his son, dressed as an astronaut (on the right), as the spaceship leaves Mars (the six-pointed star) and nears Earth (the seventh planet when counting from the outside in, symbolized by the seven dots and depicted together with the Moon). Back on the home planet, where Enki’s father AN (Anu in Akkadian) was the ruler, the progress of the landing parties was followed with anxiety and expectation. These must have turned to impatience at the slow progress, and then to disappointment. Evidently the scheme to extract gold from seawaters by laboratorylike processes did not work as expected.

But the gold was still badly needed; and the Anunnaki faced a tough decision: to abandon the project—which was out of the question—or to try to obtain the gold in a new way: mining. For gold, the Anunnaki knew by then, was naturally available in abundance in the AB.ZU (“The Primeval Source”) on the continent of Africa. (In the Semitic languages that had evolved from the Sumerian. Za-ab—Abzu in reverse—has remained the word for gold to this very day).

There was, however, one major problem. The African gold had to be extracted from the depths of the earth through mining; and the far-reaching decision to change from the sophisticated water-treatment process to a backbreaking toil below the surface of the earth was not lightly taken. Clearly the new enterprise required more Anunnaki. a mining colony in “the place of the shining lodes,” expanded facilities in Mesopotamia, and a fleet of ore vessels (MA.GUR UR.NU AB.ZU— “Ships for Ores of the Abzu”) to connect the two. Could Enki handle it all by himself?

Anu felt that he could not; and eight Nibiru years after Enki’s landing—28,800 Earth-years—he came to Earth to see things for himself. He came down accompanied by the Heir Apparent EN.LIL (“Lord of the Command”)—a son who, Anu must have felt, could take charge of Earth mission and organize the gold deliveries to Nibiru. The choice of Enlil for the mission might have been a necessary one, but it must have been an agonizing one as well; for it only sharpened the rivalry and jealousy between the two half-brothers. For Enki was the firstborn son of Anu by Id, one of his six concubines, and could have expected to follow Anu on Nibiru’s throne.

But then—as in the biblical tale of Abraham, his concubine Hagar, and his half-sister wife Sarah—Anu’s half-sister wife Antum bore him a son, Enlil. And by the Nibiruan rules of succession—so faithfully adopted by the biblical patriarch—Enlil became the legal heir instead of Enki. And now this rival, this robber of Enki’s birthright, came to Earth to take over the command! One cannot stress enough the importance of lineage and genealogy in the Wars of the Gods; the struggles for succession and supremacy, on Nibiru as on Earth later on. Indeed, as we unravel the puzzling persistence and ferocity of the wars of the gods, trying to fit them into the framework of history and prehistory—a task never undertaken before—it becomes clear that they stemmed from a code of sexual behavior based not on morality but on considerations of genetic purity. At the core of these wars lay an intricate genealogy that determined hierarchy and succession; and sexual acts were judged not by their tenderness or violence but by their purpose and outcome.

There is a Sumerian tale of how Enlil, commander-in-chief of the Anunnaki, took a fancy to a young nurse whom he saw swimming naked in the river. He persuaded her to go sailing with him and made love to her against her protestations (“my vulva is small, it knows not intercourse”). In spite of his rank Enlil was arrested by the “fifty senior gods” as he returned to his city Nippur and was found by “the seven Anunnaki who judge” to have committed the crime of rape; they sentenced him to exile in the Abzu. (He was pardoned only when he married the young goddess, who had followed him into exile.) Many songs celebrated the love affair between Inanna and a young god named Dumuzi, in which their “sleep-outs” were described with touching tenderness: O that they put his hand in my hand for me. O that they put his heart next to my heart for me. Not only is it sweet to sleep hand in hand with him. Sweetest of sweet is also the loveliness of joining heart to heart with him.

We can understand the approving tone of the verse because Dumuzi was the intended bridegroom of Inanna, chosen by her with the approval of her brother Utu/Shamash. But how to explain a text in which Inanna describes passionate lovemaking with her own brother? 82 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN My beloved met me, took his pleasure of me. rejoiced together with me. The brother brought me to his house, made me lie on its sweet bed . . . In unison, the tongue-making in unison, my brother of fairest face made fifty times. This can only be understood if we bear in mind that the code prohibited marriage, but not lovemaking, between full brother and sister. On the other hand, marriage with a half-sister was allowed; male progeny by a half-sister even had precedence in the hierarchical order. And while rape was condemned, sex—even irregular and violent—was condoned if done for the sake of succession to the throne. A long tale relates how Enki. seeking a male son by his (and Enlil’s) half-sister Sud, forced his attentions on her when she was alone and “poured the semen in the womb.” When she gave birth to a daughter (rather than to a son), Enki lost no time making love to the girl as soon as she became “young and fair … He took his joy of her, he embraced her, lay in her lap: he touches the thighs, he touches the . . . with the young one he cohabits.” This went on unabashedly with a succession of young daughters, until Sud put a curse on Enki, which paralyzed him; only then did these sexual antics in search of a male heir stop. When Enki engaged in these sexual efforts, he was already espoused to Ninki, which illustrates that the same code which condemned rape did not prohibit extramarital affairs per se.

The gods were allowed any number of wives and concubines (a text catalogued as CT-24 listed six of Anu’s concubines), but, if married, they had to select one as their official spousepreferring, as we have mentioned, a half-sister for this role. If the god, apart from his given name and many epithets, was also bestowed with a title-name, his official consort was also honored with the feminine form of such title. Thus when AN received his title-name (“The Heavenly”), his consort was called ANTU, Anu and Antum in Akkadian. The nurse who had married Enlil (“Lord of Command”) received the title-name Ninlil (“Lady of Command”); Enki’s spouse Damkina was called Ninki, and soon.

Because of the importance of the family relationships between these great Anunnaki, many so-called God Lists prepared by ancient scribes were genealogical in nature. In one such major list, titled by the ancient scribes the “AN : ilu Anum’’ series, there are listed the “forty-two foreparents of Enlil,” clearly arranged as twenty-one divine couples. This must have been a mark of great royal lineage, for two similar documents for Anu also list his twenty-one ancestral couples on Nibiru. We learn that the parents of Anu were AN.SHAR.GAL (“Great Prince of Heaven”) and KI.SHAR.GAL (“Great Princess of Firm Ground”).

As their names indicate, they were not the reigning couple on Nibiru: rather, the father was the Great Prince, meaning the heir apparent; and his spouse was a great princess, the firstborn daughter of the ruler (by a different wife) and thus a half-sister of Anshargal. In these genealogical facts lies the key to the understanding of the events on Nibiru before the landing on Earth, and on Earth thereafter.

Sending Ea to Earth for gold implies that the Nibiruans had already been aware of the metal’s availability on Earth well before the landing was launched. How?

One could offer several answers: They could have probed Earth with unmanned satellites, as we have been doing to other planets in our Solar System. They could have surveyed Earth by landing on it, as we have done on our Moon. Indeed, their landing on Mars cannot be ruled out as we read texts dealing with the space voyages from Nibiru to Earth. Whether and when such manned premeditated landings on Earth had taken place, we do not know. But there does exist an ancient chronicle dealing with an earlier landing in dramatic circumstances: when the deposed ruler of Nibiru escaped to Earth in his spacecraft! The event must have happened before Ea was sent to Earth by his father, for it was through that event that Anu became Nibiru’s ruler. Indeed the event was the usurpation of the throne on Nibiru by Anu.

The information is contained in a text whose Hittite version has been titled by scholars Kingship in Heaven. It throws light on life at the royal court of Nibiru and tells a tale of betrayal and usurpation worthy of a Shakespearean plot. It reveals that when the time for succession arrived on Nibiru—through natural death or otherwise—it was not Anshargal, Anu’s father and the heir apparent, who had ascended the throne. Instead a relative named Alalu (Alalush in the Hittite text) became the ruler. As a gesture of reconciliation or by custom, Alalu appointed Anu to be his royal cup-bearer, an honored and trusted position also known to us from several Near Eastern texts and royal depictions (Fig. 22). But after nine Nibiruan years, Anu (Anush in the Hittite text) “gave battle to Alalu” and deposed him:

Fig. 22

Once in the olden days, Alalush was king in Heaven. Alalush was seated on the throne; The mighty Anush. first among the gods. was standing before him: He would bow to his feet. set the drinking cup in his hand. For nine counted periods, Alalush was king in Heaven. In the ninth counted period. Anush gave battle to Alalush. It was then, the ancient text tells us, that the dramatic flight to Earth had occurred:

Alalush was defeated, he fled before Anush— Down he descended to the dark-hued Earth. Anush took his seat upon the throne.

While it is quite possible that much about Earth and its resources may have been known on Nibiru even before Alalu’s flight, the fact is that we do have in this tale a record of the arrival on Earth of a spaceship bearing Nibiruans before Ea’s mission to Earth. The Sumerian King Lists report that the first administrator of Eridu was called Alulim—a name that could have been yet another epithet for Ea/Enki, or the Sumerian rendering of Alalu’s name; the possibility thus comes to mind that, though deposed, Alalu was sufficiently concerned about Nibiru’s fate to advise his deposer that he had found gold in Earth’s waters. That this is indeed what had happened might be indicated by the fact that a reconciliation between deposed and deposer did ensue; for Anu went ahead and appointed Kumarbi, a grandson of Alalu, to be his royal cup-bearer. But the gesture of reconciliation only caused history on Nibiru to repeat itself. In spite of all the bestowed honors, the young Kumarbi could not forget that Anu had usurped the throne from his grandfather; and as time went on, Kumarbi’s enmity toward Anu was becoming more and more obvious, and Anu “could not withstand the gaze of Kumarbi’s eyes.” And so it was that, having decided to leave Nibiru for Earth and even take the Heir Apparent (Enlil) with him, Anu deemed it safer also to take along the young Kumarbi. Both decisions—to take Enlil with him and to take Kumarbi along—ended up making the visit one marred by strife and—for Anu—also filled with personal agony. The decision to bring Enlil to Earth and put him in charge led to heated arguments with Enki—arguments echoed in the texts so far discovered. The angry Enki threatened to leave Earth and return to Nibiru: but could he be trusted not to usurp the throne there? If. as a compromise. Anu himself were to stay on Earth, appointing Enlil as surrogate ruler on Nibiru, could Enlil be trusted to step down when Anu returned? Finally it was decided to draw lots: let chance determine how it shall be. The division of authority that ensued is repeatedly mentioned in Sumerian and Akkadian texts. One of the longest of the Earth Chronicles, a text called The Atra-Hasis Epic, records the drawing of lots and its outcome:

The gods clasped hands together, then cast lots and divided: Anu to heaven went up; To Enlil the Earth was made subject; That which the sea as a loop encloses, 86 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN they gave to the prince Enki. To the Abzu Enki went down, assumed the rulership of the Abzu. Believing that he had managed to separate the rival brothers, “Anu to Heaven went up.” But in the skies above Earth, an unexpected turn of events awaited him. Perhaps as a precaution, Kumarbi was left on the space platform orbiting Earth; when Anu returned to it, ready to take off on the long voyage back to Nibiru, he was confronted by an angry Kumarbi. Harsh words soon gave way to a scuffle: “Anu gave battle to Kumarbi, Kumarbi gave battle to Anu.” As Kumarbi bested Anu in the wrestling, “Anu struggled free from the hands of Kumarbi.” But Kumarbi managed to grab Anu by his feet, and “bit between his knees,” hurting Anu in his “manhood.” Ancient depictions were found of the event (Fig. 23a), as well as of the habit of wrestling Anunnaki (Fig. 23b) to hurt one another in the genitals. Fig. 23 Disgraced and in pain, Anu took off on his way to Nibiru, leaving Kumarbi behind with the astronauts manning the space platforms and shuttlecraft. But before he departed, he put on Kumarbi a curse of “three monsters in his belly.” The similarity of this Hittite tale to the Greek tale of the castration of Uranus by Cronos, and the swallowing by Cronos of his The Earth Chronicles 87 sons, needs no elaboration. And, as in the Greek tales, this episode set the stage for the wars between the gods and the Titans. After Anu had left, Earth Mission was launched in earnest. As more Anunnaki landed on Earth—their number rose in time to 600—some were assigned to the Lower World to help Enki mine the gold; others manned the ore ships; and the rest stayed with Enlil in Mesopotamia. There, additional settlements were established in accordance with a master plan laid out by Enlil, as part of a complete organizational plan of action and clear-cut procedures: He perfected the procedures, the divine ordinances; Established five cities in perfect places, Called them by name, Laid them out as centers. The first of these cities, Eridu, He granted to Nudimmud, the pioneer.

Each of these pre-Diluvial settlements in Mesopotamia had a specific function, revealed by its name. First was E.RI.DU— “House in Faraway Built”—the gold-extracting facility by the waters’ edge, which for all time remained Ea’s Mesopotamian abode. Next came BAD.TIBIRA—“Bright Place Where the Ores Are Made Final”—the metallurgical center for smelting and refining. Next LA.RA.AK—“Seeing the Bright Glow”—was a beacon-city to guide the landing shuttlecraft. SIPPAR—“Bird City”—was the Landing Place; and SHU.RUP.PAK-“The Place of Utmost Well-Being”—was equipped as a medical center; it was put in the charge of SUD (“She Who Resuscitates”), a half-sister of both Enki and Enlil.

Another beacon-city. LA.AR.SA (“Seeing the Red Light”), was also built, for the complex operation depended on close coordination between the Anunnaki who had landed on Earth and 300 astronauts, called IGI.GI (“Those Who See and Observe”), who remained in constant Earth orbit. Acting as intermediaries between Earth and Nibiru, the Igigi stayed in Earth’s skies on orbiting platforms, to which the processed ores were delivered from Earth by shuttlecraft, thereafter to be transferred to proper spaceships, which could ferry the gold to the Home Planet as it periodically neared Earth in its vast elliptical orbit. Astronauts and equipment were delivered to Earth by the same stages, in reverse. All of that required a Mission Control Center, which Enlil proceeded to build and equip. It was named NIBRU.KI (“The EarthPlace of Nibiru”)—Nippur in Akkadian. There, atop an artificially raised platform equipped with antennas—the prototype of the Mesopotamian “Towers of Babel” (Fig. 24)—was a secret chamber, the DIR.GA (“Dark, Glowing Chamber”) where space charts (“the emblems of the stars”) were displayed and where the DUR.AN.KI (“Bond Heaven-Earth”) was maintained. The Chronicles have asserted that the first settlements of the Anunnaki on Earth were “laid out as centers.” To this enigmatic statement was added the puzzle of the claim by post-Diluvial kings that in reestablishing in Sumer the cities wiped out by the Flood, they had followed The everlasting ground plan. that which for all time the construction has determined. It is the one which bears the drawings from the Olden Times and the writing of the Upper Heaven. The puzzle will be solved if we mark out those first cities established by Enki and Enlil on the region’s map and connect them with concentric circles. They were indeed “laid out as centers”: all were equidistant from the Mission Control Center in Nippur. It was indeed a plan “from Upper Heaven.” for it made sense only to those who could view the whole Near East from high above Earth: Choosing the twin-peaked Mount Ararat—the area’s most conspic- The Earth Chronicles 89 uous feature—as their landmark, they placed the spaceport where the north line based on Ararat crossed the visible Euphrates River. In this “everlasting ground plan,” all the cities were arranged as an arrow, marking out the Landing Path to the Spaceport at Sippar (Fig. 25). The periodic deliveries of gold to Nibiru mitigated the concerns. Fig. 25 90 THE WARS OF GODS AND MEN even the rivalries, on that planet, for Anu stayed on as its ruler for a long time thereafter. But on Earth all the main actors were present on the “dark-hued” stage to give vent to every imaginable emotion and to incredible conflicts.