10 - WHEN WISDOM WAS LOWERED FROM HEAVEN

The Sumerian King Lists—a record of rulers, cities, and events arranged chronologically—divide prehistory and history into two distinct parts: first the long record of what had happened before the Deluge, then what transpired after the Deluge. One was the time when the Anunnaki “gods” and then their sons by the “daughters of Man,” the so-called demigods, ruled upon the Earth; the other was when human rulers—kings selected by Enlil—were interposed between the “gods” and the people. In both instances the institution of an organized society and orderly government, “Kingship,” was stated to have been “lowered from heaven”—the emulation on Earth of the societal and governmental organization on Nibiru.

“When kingship was lowered from heaven,” begins the Sumerian King List, “kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king and ruled 28,800 years.”

After listing the other antediluvial rulers and cities, the text states that “then the Flood swept over the Earth.” And it continues:

“After the Flood had swept over the Earth, when kingship was lowered again from heaven, kingship was in Kish.”

From then on, the lists take us into historical times.

Although the subject of this volume is what we call Science and the ancients called Wisdom, a few words about “Kingship”—the good order of things, an organized society and its institutions—will not be out of place, because without them no scientific progress or the dissemination and preservation of “Wisdom” could be possible. “Kingship” was the “portfolio” of Enlil, the Chief Administrator of the Anunnaki on Earth. It is noteworthy that as in so many scientific fields where we still live off and build upon the Sumerian bequests, so does the institution of kings and kingship still exist, having served Mankind for so many millennia. Samuel N. Kramer, in History Begins at Sumer, listed scores of “firsts” begun there, including a bicameral chamber of elected (or selected) deputies.

Various aspects of an organized and orderly society were incorporated into the concept of kingship, first and foremost among them the need for justice. A king was required to be “righteous” and to promulgate and uphold the laws, for Sumerian society was one that lived by the law. Many have learnt in school of the Babylonian king Hammurabi and his famous law code, dating back to the second millenium B.C.; but at least two thousand years before him Sumerian kings had already promulgated codes of law. The difference was that Hammurabi’s was a code of crime and punishment: if you do this, your punishment will be that.

The Sumerian law codes, on the other hand, were codes of just behavior; they stated that “you should not take away a widow’s donkey” or delay the wages of a day laborer. The Bible’s Ten Commandments were, like the Sumerian codes, not a list of punishments but a code of what is right to do and what is wrong and should not be done. The laws were upheld by a judicial administration. It is from Sumer that we have inherited the concept of judges, juries, witnesses, and contracts. The unit of society we call the “family,” based on a contractual marriage, was instituted in Sumer; so were rules and customs of succession, of adoption, of the rights of widows.

The rule of law was also applied to economic activities: exchange based on contracts, rules for employment, wages, and—how else—taxation. We know much of Sumer’s foreign trade, for example, because there had been a customs station at a city called Drehem where meticulous records were kept of all commercial movements of goods and animals. All that and more came under the umbrella of “Kingship.” As the sons and grandchildren of Enlil entered the stage of relations between Man and his gods, the functions of kingship and the supervision of kings were gradually handed over to them, and Enlil as the All Beneficent became a cherished memory. But to this day what we call a “civilized society” still owes its foundations to the time when “kingship was lowered from heaven.”

“Wisdom”—sciences and the arts, the activities that required know-how—were the domain first of Enki, the Chief Scientist of the Anunnaki, and later on, of his children. We learn from a text scholars call “Inanna and Enki: The Transfer of the Arts of Civilization” that Enki possessed certain unique objects called ME—a kind of computer or data disks—which held the information needed for the sciences, the handicrafts, and the arts. Numbering more than a hundred, they included such diverse subjects as writing, music, metalworking, construction, transportation, anatomy, medical treatments, flood control, and urban decay; also, as other lists make clear, astronomy, mathematics, and the calendar.

Like Kingship, Wisdom was “lowered to Earth from Heaven,” granted to Mankind by the Anunnaki “gods.” It was by their sole decision that scientific knowledge was passed on to Mankind, usually through the medium of selected individuals; the instance of Adapa, to whom Enki granted “wide understanding,” has already been mentioned. As rule, however, the chosen person belonged to the priesthood—another “first” that stayed with Mankind for millennia through the Middle Ages, when priests and monks were still also the scientists.

Sumerian texts tell of Enmeduranki who was groomed by the gods to be the first priest, and relate how the gods Showed him how to observe oil and water, secrets of Anu, Enlil and Enki.

They gave him the Divine Tablet,
the engraved secrets of Heaven and Earth.
They taught him how to make calculations with numbers.

These brief statements disclose considerable information. The first subject Enmeduranki was taught, the knowledge of “oil and water,” concerned medicine. In Sumerian times physicians were called either an A.ZU or a IA.ZU, meaning “One who knows water” and “One who knows oil,” and the difference was the method by which they administered medicaments: mixed and drunk down with water, or mixed with oil and administered by an enema.

Next, Enmeduranki was given a “divine,” or celestial, tablet on which were engraved the “secrets of Heaven and Earth”—information about the planets and the Solar System and the visible constellations of stars, as well as knowledge about “Earth sciences”—geography, geology, geometry and—since the Enuma elish was incorporated into the temple rituals on New Year’s Eve—cosmogony and evolution. And, to be able to understand all that—the third subject, mathematics: “calculations with numbers.”

In Genesis the story of the antediluvial patriarch called Enoch is summed up in the statement that he did not die but was taken up to the Lord when he was 365 years old (a number that corresponds to the number of days in a year); but considerably more information about Enoch is provided in the Book of Enoch (of which several renderings have been found), which was not made part of the Bible.

In it the knowledge imparted by angels to Enoch is described in much detail; it included mining and metallurgy and the secrets of the Lower World, geography and the way Earth is watered, astronomy and the laws governing celestial motions, how to calculate the calendar, knowledge of plants and flowers and foods and so on—all shown to Enoch in special books and on “heavenly tablets.” The biblical Book of Proverbs devotes a good deal of its teachings to Man’s need for Wisdom and to the realization that it is granted by God only to the righteous, “for it is the Lord who giveth wisdom.” The many secrets of Heaven and Earth that Wisdom encompasses are highlighted in an Ode to Wisdom found in chapter 8 of Proverbs. The Book of Job likewise extols the virtues of Wisdom and all the abundance Man can obtain by it, but pointedly asks:

“But whence cometh Wisdom, and where is the source of Understanding?”

To which the answer is. “It is God who understands the way thereof”; the Hebrew word translated “God ” is Elohim, the plural term first used in the creation tales. It is certain that the inspiration for these two biblical books, if not their actual source, was Sumerian and Akkadian texts of proverbs and of the Sumerian equivalent of the Book of Job; the latter, interestingly, was titled “I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom.”

There was no doubt in ancient times that scientific knowledge was a gift and a teaching from the “gods”—the Anunnaki, Elohim—to Mankind. The assertions that astronomy was a major subject are self-evident statements, since, as must be evident from earlier chapters in this book, the astounding knowledge in Sumerian times of the complete Solar System and the cosmogony that explained the origin of Earth, the asteroid belt, and the existence of Nibiru could have come only from the Anunnaki.

While I have seen a gratifying increase—to some extent, I would like to think, due to my writings—in the recognition of the Sumerian contribution to the beginnings and concept of laws, medical treatment, and cuisine, the parallel recognition of the immense Sumerian contribution to astronomy has not come about; this, I suspect, because of the hesitation in crossing the “forbidden threshold” of the inevitable next step: if you admit what the Sumerians knew about celestial matters, you must admit the existence not only of Nibiru but also of its people, the Anunnaki...

Nevertheless, this “fear of crossing” (a nice play on words, since Nibiru’s name meant “Planet of the Crossing” . . .) in no way negates the fact that modem astronomy owes to the Sumerians (and through them, to the Anunnaki) the basic concept of a spherical astronomy with all its technicalities; the concept of an ecliptic as the belt around the Sun in which the planets orbit; the grouping of stars into constellations; the grouping of the constellations seen in the ecliptic into the Houses of the Zodiac; and the application of the number 12 to these constellations, to the months of the year, and to other celestial, or “divine,” matters.

This emphasis on the number 12 can be traced to the fact that the Solar System has twelve members, and each leading Anunnaki was assigned a celestial counterpart, forming a pantheon of twelve “Olympians” who were also each assigned a constellation and a month. Astrologers certainly owe much to these celestial divisions, since in the planet Nibiru astrologers find the twelfth member of the Solar System that they have been missing for so long.

As the Book of Enoch details and as the biblical reference to the number 365 attests, a direct result of the knowledge of the interrelated motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth was the development of the calendar: the counting of the days (and their nights), the months, and the years. It is now generally recognized that the Western calendar we use nowadays harkens back to Mankind’s first-ever calendar, the one known as the Calendar of Nippur.

Based on the alignment of its start with the spring equinox in the zodiac of Taurus, scholars have concluded that this calendar was instituted at the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. Indeed, the very concept of a calendar that is coordinated with the Earth-Sun occurrences of the equinoxes (the time the Sun crosses the equator and day and night are equal) or, alternatively, with the solstices (when the Sun appears to have reached its farthest point north or south)—concepts that are found in all calendars in both the Old World and the New World—come to us from Sumer.

The Jewish calendar, as I have repeatedly pointed out in books and articles, still adheres to the calendar of Nippur not only in its form and structure but also in its count of years. In A.D. 1990 the Jewish calendar counts the year 5750; and it is not from “the creation of the world,” as the explanation has been, but from the start of the calendar of Nippur in 3760 B.C. It was in that year, I have suggested in The Lost Realms, that Anu, Nibiru’s king, came to Earth on a state visit. His name, AN in Sumerian and Anu in Akkadian, meant “heaven,” “The Heavenly One.” and was a component of numerous astronomical terms, such as AN.UR (“celestial horizon”) and AN.PA (“point of zenith”), as well as being a component of the name “Anunnaki,” “Those Who From Heaven to Earth Came.”

Archaic Chinese, whose syllables were written and pronounced in a manner that reveals their Sumerian origin, used for example the term kuan to denote a temple that served as an observatory; the Sumerian kernel of the term, KU.AN, had meant “opening to the heavens.” (The Sumerian origin of Chinese astronomy and astrology was discussed by me in the article “The Roots of Astrology,” which appeared in the February 1985 issue of East-West Journal). Undoubtedly, the Latin annum (“year”) from which the French annee (“year”), the English annual (“yearly”), and so on stem from the time when the calendar and the count of years began with the state visit of AN.

The Chinese tradition of combining temples with observatories has, of course, not been limited to China; it harkens back to the ziggurats (step pyramids) of Sumer and Babylon.

Indeed, a long text dealing with that visit by Anu and his spouse Antu to Sumer relates how the priests ascended to the ziggurat’s topmost level to observe the appearance of Nibiru in the skies.

Figure 63

Enki imparted the knowledge of astronomy (and of other sciences) to his firstborn son Marduk, and the renowned ziggurat of Babylon, built there after Marduk gained supremacy in Mesopotamia, was built to serve as an astronomical observatory (Fig. 63).

Enki bestowed the “secrets” of the calendar, mathematics, and writing on his younger son Ningishzidda, whom the Egyptians called Thoth. In The Lost Realms I present substantial evidence to show that he was one and the same Mesoamerican god known as Quetzalcoatl, “The Plumed Serpent.” This god’s name, which means (in Sumerian) “Lord of the Tree of Life,” reflected the fact that it was to him that Enki entrusted medical knowledge, including the secret of reviving the dead. A Babylonian text quotes the exasperated Enki as telling Marduk he had taught him enough, when Marduk also wanted to learn the secret of reviving the dead.

That the Anunnaki could achieve that feat (at least in so far as their own were concerned). Figure 64 is clear from a text titled “The Descent of Inanna to the Lower World,” where she was put to death by her own sister. When her father appealed to Enki to revive the goddess, Enki directed at the corpse “that which pulsates” and “that which radiates” and brought her back to life. A Mesopotamian depiction of a patient on a hospital table shows him receiving radiation treatment (Fig. 64).

Fig. 64

Putting aside the ability to revive the dead (which is mentioned as fact in the Bible), it is certain that the teaching of anatomy and medicine was part of priestly training, as stated in the Enmeduranki text. That the tradition continued into later times is clear from Leviticus, one of the Five Books of Moses, which contains extensive instructions by Yahweh to the Israelite priests in matters of health, medical prognosis, treatment and hygiene. The dietary commandments regarding “appropriate” (kosher) and non-appropriate foods undoubtedly stemmed from health and hygienic considerations rather than from religious observance; and many believe that the important requirement of circumcision was also rooted in medical reasons.

These instructions were not unlike those in numerous earlier Mesopotamian texts that served as medical manuals for the A.ZUs and IA.ZUs, which instructed the physician • priests to first observe the symptoms; next stated which remedy had to be applied; and then gave a list of the chemicals, herbs, and other pharmaceutical ingredients from which the medicines were to be prepared.

That the Elohim were the source of these teachings should come as no surprise when we recall the medical, anatomical, and genetic feats of Enki and Ninti. Basic to the science of astronomy and the workings of the calendar, as well as to commerce and economic activity, was the knowledge of mathematics—the “making of calculations with numbers,” in the words of the Enmeduranki text.

The Sumerian numbers system is called sexagesimal, meaning “base 60.” The count ran from 1 to 60, as we now do with 1 to 100. But then, where we say “two hundred,” the Sumerians said (or wrote) “2 gesh,” meaning 2 x 60, which equaled 120. When in their calculations the text said “take half” or “take one-third,” the meaning was one-half of 60 = 30, one-third of 60 = 20. This might seem to us, reared on the decimal system (“times 10”), which is geared to the number of fingers on our hands, cumbersome and complicated; but to a mathematician, the sexagesimal system is a delight. The number 10 is divisible by very few other whole numbers (by 2 and 5 only, to be precise).

The number 100 is divisible only by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, and 50. But 60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. Inasmuch as we have inherited the Sumerian 12 in our counting of the daily hours, 60 in our counting of time (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour), and 360 in geometry (360 degrees in a circle), the sexagesimal system is still the only perfect one in the celestial sciences, in time reckoning, and in geometry (where a triangle has angles adding up to 180 degrees and a square’s angles add up to 360 degrees).

In both theoretical and applied geometry (such as the measuring of field areas) this system made it possible to calculate the areas of diverse and complex shapes (Fig, 65), the volumes of vessels of all kinds (needed to hold grains or oil or wine), the length of canals, or the distances between planets.

When record keeping began, a stylus with a round tip was used to impress on wet clay the various symbols that stood for the numbers 1, 10, 60, 600, and 3,600 (Fig. 66a). The ultimate numeral was 3,600, signified by a large circle; it was called SAR (Shar in Akkadian)—the “princely,” or “royal,” number, the number of Earth-years it took Nibiru to complete one orbit around the Sun.

Figure 65

Figure 66
 

With the introduction of cuneiform (“wedge-shaped”) writing, in which scribes used a wedge-shaped stylus (Fig. 66b), the numerals were also written in wedge-shaped signs (Fig. 66c). Other cuneiform signs denoted fractions or multiples (Fig. 66d); together with combination signs that instructed the calculator to add, subtract, divide, or multiply, problems in arithmetic and algebra that would baffle many of today’s students were correctly solved. These problems included the squaring, cubing, or finding the square root of numbers.

As shown by F. Thureau-Dangin in Textes mathematiques Babyloniens, the ancients followed prescribed formulas, with two or even three unknowns, that are still in use today. Although dubbed “sexagesimal,” the Sumerian system of numeration and mathematics was in reality not simply based on the number 60 but on a combination of 6 and 10. While in the decimal system each step up is accomplished by multiplying the previous sum by 10 (Fig. 67a), in the Sumerian system the numbers increased by alternate multiplications: once by 10, then by 6, then by 10, then again by 6 (Fig. 67b).

This method has puzzled today’s scholars. The decimal system is obviously geared to the ten digits of the human hands (as the numbers, too, are still called), so the 10 in the Sumerian system can be understood; but where did the 6 come from, and why?

Figure 67

There have been other puzzles. Among the thousands of mathematical tablets from Mesopotamia, many held tables of

ready-made calculations. Surprisingly, however, they did not run from smaller numbers up (like 1, 10, 60, etc.) but ran down, starting from a number that can only be described as astronomical: 12,960,000.

An example quoted by Th.G. Pinches (Some Mathematical Tablets of the British Museum) began with the following lines at the top:

1. 12960000 its 2/3 part   8640000
2.                its half part   6480000
3.                its third “      4320000
4.                its fourth “     3240000

...and continued all the way down through “its 80th part 180000” to the 400th part “[which is] 32400.”

Other tablets carried the procedure down to the 16,000th part (equals 810), and there is no doubt that this series continued downward to 60, the 216,000th part of the initial number 12,960,000. H. V. Hilprecht (The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania), after studying thousands of mathematical tablets from the temple libraries of Nippur and Sippar and from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, concluded that the number 12,960,000 was literally astronomical—that it stemmed from the phenomenon of Precession, which retards the zodiac constellation against which the Sun rises by a full House once in 2,160 years.

The complete circle of the twelve Houses, by which the Sun returns to its original background spot, thus takes 25,920 years; the number 12,960,000 represented five hundred such complete Precessional circles.

It was incredible to learn, as Hilprecht and others have, that the Sumerians were not only aware of the phenomenon of precession but also knew that a shift from House to House in the zodiac required 2,160 years; it was doubly incomprehensible that they chose as the base of their mathematics a number representing five hundred complete twelve-House cycles, each one of which required the fantastic (as far as human beings are concerned) time span of 25,920 years. In fact, while modern astronomy accepts the existence of the phenomenon and its periods as calculated in Sumer, there is no scientist now or in former times who can or could confirm from personal experience the shift of even one House (a shift to Aquarius is now anticipated); and all the scientists put together have yet to witness one complete cycle. Stilt, there it is in the Sumerian tablets.

It seems to me that a solution to all these puzzles can be found if modern science will accept the existence of Nibiru and its Anunnaki as fact. Since it was they who had granted mathematical “wisdom” to Mankind, the astronomical base number and the sexagesimal system were developed by the Anunnaki for their own use and from their own viewpoint—and then were scaled down to human proportions. As Hilprecht has correctly suggested, the number 12,960,000 indeed stemmed from astronomy—the time (25,920 years) required for a full precessional cycle. But that cycle could be broken down to more human-sized proportions, that of the precessional shift by one zodiacal House. Although a complete shift in 2,160 years was also beyond an Earthling’s lifetime, the gradual shift of one degree every 72 years was an observable phenomenon (which the astronomer-priests witnessed and dealt with). This was the “earthly” element in the formulation.

Then there was the orbital period of Nibiru, which the Anunnaki knew equaled 3,600 Earth-years. Here, then, were two basic and immutable phenomena, cycles of a certain length that combined the movements of Nibiru and Earth in a ratio of 3,600:2,160. This ratio can be reduced to 10:6. Once in 21,600 years, Nibiru completed six orbits around the Sun and Earth shifted ten zodiacal houses. This, I suggest, created the 6 x 1 0 x 6 x 1 0 system of alternating counting that is called “sexagesimal.”

The sexagesimal system, as has been noted, still lies at the core of modern astronomy and time-keeping. So has the legacy of the 10:6 ratio of the Anunnaki. Having perfected architecture and the eye-pleasing plastic arts, the Greeks devised a canon of proportions called the Golden Section. They held that a perfect and pleasing ratio of the sides of a temple or great chamber was reached by the formula AB:AP = AP:PB, which gives a ratio of the long part or side to the shorter one of 100 to 61.8 (feet, cubits, or whatever unit of measure is chosen). It seems to me that architecture owes the debt for this Golden Section not to the Greeks but to the Anunnaki (via the Sumerians), for this ratio is really the 10:6 ratio on which the sexagesimal system was based.

The same can be said of the mathematical phenomenon known as the Fibonacci Numbers, wherein a series of numbers grows in such a way that each successive number (e.g., 5) is the sum of its two preceding numbers (2 + 3); then 8 is the sum of 3 + 5, and so on. The fifteenth century mathematician Lucas Pacioli recognized the algebraic formula for this series and called the quotient—1.618-—the Golden Number and its reciprocal—0.618—the Divine Number. Which brings us back to the Anunnaki...

Having explained how, in my opinion, the sexagesimal system was devised, let us look at what Hilprecht concluded was the upper base of the system, the number 12,960,000. It is easy to show that this number is simply the square of the real basic number of the Anunnaki—3,600—which is the length in Earth-years of Nibiru’s orbit. (3,600 x 3,600 = 12,960,000). It was from dividing 3,600 by the earthly ten that the easier-to-handle number of 360 degrees in a circle was obtained. The number 3,600, in turn, is the square of 60; this relationship provided the number of minutes in an hour and (in modern times) the number of seconds in a minute, and of course the basic sexagesimal number.

The zodiacal origin of the astronomical number 12,960,000 can, I believe, explain a puzzling biblical statement. It is in Psalm 90 that we read that the Lord—the reference is to the “Celestial Lord”—who has had his abode in the heavens for countless generations and from the time “before the mountains were brought forth, before Earth and continents were created,” considers a thousand years to be merely a single day:

A thousand years in thine eyes
are but a day, a yesterday past.

Now if we divide the number 12,960,000 by 2,160 (the number of years to achieve a shift from one zodiac House), the result is 6,000—a thousand times six. Six as a number of “days” is not unfamiliar—we came upon it at the beginning of Genesis and its six days of creation. Could the psalmist have seen the mathematical tablets in which he would have found the line listing “12,960,000 the 2160th part of which is a thousand times six”? It is indeed intriguing to find that the Psalms echo the numbers with which the Anunnaki had toyed.

In Psalm 90 and other relevant psalms, the Hebrew word translated as “generation” is Dor. It stems from the root dur, “to be circular, to cycle.” For human beings it does mean a generation; but for celestial bodies it means a cycle around the sun—an orbit. It is with this understanding that the true meaning of Psalm 102, the moving prayer of a mortal to the Everlasting One, can be grasped:

But thou, O Lord, shalt abide forever,
and thy remembrance from cycle to cycle.
For He hath looked down from his sanctuary on high:
From Heaven did Yahweh behold the Earth.
I say. my God,
“Do not ascend me in the midst of my days,”

thou whose years arc in a cycle of cycles.
Thou art unchanged;
Thine years shalt have no end.

Relating it all to the orbit of Nibiru, to its cycle of 3,600 Earth-years, to the precessional retardation of Earth in its orbit around the Sun—this is the secret of the Wisdom of Numbers that the Anunnaki lowered from Heaven to Earth. Before Man could “calculate with numbers,” the other two of the “three Rs”—reading and ‘riting—had to be mastered. We take it for granted that Man can speak, that we have languages by which to communicate to our fellow men (or clansmen).

But modern science has not held it so; in fact, until quite recently, the scientists dealing with speech and languages believed that “Talking Man” was a rather late phenomenon that may have been one reason the Cro-Magnons—who could speak and converse with each other—took over from the nonspeaking Neanderthals.

This was not the biblical view. The Bible took it for granted, for example, that the Elohim who were on Earth long before The Adam could speak and address each other. This is apparent from the statement that The Adam was created as a result of a discussion among the Elohim, in which it was said, “Let us make The Adam in our image and after our likeness.” This implies not only the ability to speak but also a language with which to communicate.

Let us now look at The Adam. He is placed in the Garden of Eden and is told what to eat and what to avoid. The instructions were understood by The Adam, as the ensuing conversation between the Serpent and Eve makes clear. The Serpent (whose identity is discussed in The Wars of Gods and Men),

“said unto the woman: Hath Elohim indeed said, Ye shall not eat of all the trees in the garden?”

Eve says yes, the fruit of one tree was forbidden on penalty of death. But the Serpent assures the woman it is not so, and she and Adam eat of the forbidden fruit.

A lengthy dialogue then ensues. Adam and Eve hide when they hear the footsteps of Yahweh, “strolling in the garden in the cool of the day.”

Yahweh calls out to Adam, “Where are you?” and the following exchange takes place:

Adam: “I heard the sound of you in the garden and I was afraid because 1 am naked, and I hid.”
Yahweh: “Who told you that you are naked? Did you eat of the tree of which I ordered you not to eat?”
Adam: “The woman whom you placed with me, she is the one who gave me of the tree, and I ate.”
Yahweh: [to the woman] “What have you done?”
Woman: “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.”

This is quite a conversation. Not only the Deity can speak; Adam and Eve can also speak and understand the Deity’s language. So, in what language did they converse, for there must have been one (according to the Bible). If Eve was the First Mother, was there a First Language—a Mother Tongue? Again, scholars began by differing with the Bible. They assumed that language was a cultural heritage rather than an evolutionary trait. It was assumed that Man progressed from groans to meaningful shouts (on seeing prey or sensing danger) to rudimentary speech as he formed clans. From words and syllables, languages were born—many languages, arising simultaneously as clans and tribes formed.

This theory of the origin of languages not only ignored the significance of the biblical tales of the Elohim and of the incident in the Garden of Eden; it denied the biblical assertion that prior to the incident of the Tower of Babel “the whole Earth was of one language and of one kind of words”; that it was a deliberate act of the Elohim to disperse Mankind all over the Earth and “confuse” its language “that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

It is gratifying to note that in recent years, modern science has come around to the belief that there was indeed a Mother Tongue; and that both types of Homo sapiens—Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal—could talk from the very beginning. That many languages have words that sound the same and have similar meanings has long been recognized, and that certain languages can therefore be grouped into families has been an accepted theory for over a century, when German scholars proposed naming these language families “Indo-European,” “Semitic,” “Hamitic,” and so on.

But this very grouping held the obstacle to the recognition of a Mother Tongue, because it was based on the notion that totally different and unrelated groups of languages developed independently in different “core zones” from which migrants carried their tongues to other lands. Attempts to show that there are apparent word and meaning similarities even between distant groups, such as the writings in the nineteenth century by the Reverend Charles Foster (The One Primeval Language, in which he pointed to the Mesopotamian precursors of Hebrew) were dismissed as no more than a theologian’s attempt to elevate the status of the Bible’s language, Hebrew.

It was mainly advances in other fields, such as anthropology, biogenetics and the Earth sciences, as well as computerization, that opened new avenues of study of what some call “linguistic genetics.” The notion that languages developed rather late in Man’s march to civilization—at one point the beginning of languages (not just speech) was put at only five thousand years ago—obviously had to be amended and the date pushed back to much earlier times when archaeological finds showed that the Sumerians could already write six thousand years ago.

As the dates of ten thousand and twelve thousand years ago were being considered, the search for points of similarity, speeded up by computers, led scholars to the discovery of protolanguages and thus to larger and less numerous groupings. Searching for an early affiliation for the Slavic languages, Soviet scientists under the leadership of Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aaron Dolgopolsky suggested, in the 1960s, a proto-language they termed Nostratic (from the Latin “Our Language”) as the core of most European (including Slavic) languages.

Later on they presented evidence for a second such proto-language, which they termed Dene-Caucasian, as the core tongue of the Far Eastern languages. Both began, they estimated from linguistic mutations, about twelve thousand years ago. In the United States, Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University and his colleague Merritt Ruhlen suggested a third proto-language, Amerind.

Without dwelling on the significance of the fact, it behooves me to mention that the date of about twelve thousand years ago would put the period of the appearance of these protolanguages somewhere around the immediate aftermath of the Deluge, which in The 12th Planet was shown to have occurred about thirteen thousand years ago; that also conforms to the biblical notion that post-Diluvial Mankind divided into three branches, descended from the three sons of Noah. Meanwhile, archaeological discoveries kept pushing back the time of human migrations, and this was especially significant in regard to the arrival of migrants in the Americas.

When a time of twenty thousand years or even thirty thousand years ago was suggested, Joseph Greenberg created a sensation when he demonstrated in 1987 (Language in the Americas) that the hundreds of tongues in the New World could be grouped into just three families, which he termed Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and Amerind. The greater significance of his conclusions was that these three in turn were brought to the Americas by migrants from Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific and thus in effect were not true proto-languages but offshoots of Old World ones.

The protolanguage he called “Na-Dene,” Greenberg suggested, was related to the Dene-Caucasian group of the Soviet scholars. This family, Merritt Ruhlen wrote in Natural History (March 1987), appears to be “genetically closest” to the group of languages that include “the extinct languages Etruscan and Sumerian.” Eskimo-Aleut, he wrote, is most closely related to the Indo-European languages. (Readers wishing to know more about the earliest arrivals in the Americas may want to read The Lost Realms, Book IV of “The Earth Chronicles” series).

But did true languages begin only about twelve thousand years ago—only after the Deluge? It is not only according to the Bible that language existed at the very beginning of Homo sapiens (Adam and Eve), but also the fact that Sumerian texts repeatedly refer to inscribed tablets that dated from before the Deluge. The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal boasted that, knowledgeable as Adapa, he could read “tablets from before the Deluge.” If so, there had to be true language even much earlier. Discoveries by paleontologists and anthropologists make linguists push their estimations back in time. The discoveries in the Kebara cave, mentioned earlier, indeed forced a complete reevaluation of previous timetables.

Among the finds in the cave was an astounding clue. The skeletal remains of a sixty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal included an intact hyoid bone—the first ever to be discovered. This horned-shaped bone which lies between the chin and the larynx (voice box) anchors the muscles that move the tongue, lower jaw, and larynx and makes human speech possible (Fig. 68).
Combined with other skeletal features, the hyoid bone offered unequivocal proof that Man could speak as he does today at least sixty thousand years ago and probably much earlier. Neanderthal Man, the team of six international scientists led by Baruch Arensburg of Tel-Aviv University stated in Nature (April 27, 1989), “had the morphological basis for human speech capability.”

Figure 68

If so, how could Indo-European, whose origins are traceable to only a few thousand years ago, be given such a prominent position on the language tree? Less inhibited about lowering the claims for Indo-European than their Western colleagues, Soviet scholars continued to search audaciously for a protoproto language. Spearheading the search for a Mother Tongue have been Aaron Dolgopolsky, now at Haifa University in Israel, and Vitaly Shevoroshkin, now at the University of Michigan. It was primarily on the latter’s initiative that a “breakthrough” conference was held at the University of Michigan in November 1988. Titled “Language and Prehistory,” the conference brought together, from seven countries, more than forty scholars from the fields of linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, and genetics. The consensus was that there had been a “mono-genesis” of human languages—a Mother Tongue in a “proto-proto-proto stage” at a time about 100,000 years ago.

Still, scientists from other fields relating to the anatomy of speech, such as Philip Lieberman of Brown University and Dean Falk of the State University of New York at Albany, see speech as a trait of Homo sapiens from the very first appearance of these ‘”Thinking/Wise Men.” Brain specialists such as Ronald E. Myers of the National Institute of Communicative Disorders and Strokes believe that “human speech developed spontaneously, unrelated to the crude vocalization of other primates,” as soon as humans acquired their two-part brains.

And Allan Wilson, who had participated in the genetic research leading to the ”One-Mother-of-All” conclusion, put speech back in the mouth of “Eve”:

“The human capacity for language may have come from a genetic mutation that occurred in a woman who lived in Africa 200,000 years ago,” he announced at a meeting in January 1989 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Gift of Gab Goes Back to Eve,” one newspaper headlined the story.

Well, to Eve and Adam, according to the Bible. And so we arrive at the last of the Rs—writing. It is now believed that many of the shapes and symbols found in Ice Age caves in Europe, attributed to Cro-Magnons living during the period of between twenty thousand and thirty thousand years ago, represent crude pictographs—“picture writing.”

Undoubtedly, Man learned to write long after he began to speak. The Mesopotamian texts insist that there was writing before the Deluge, and there is no reason to disbelieve this. But the first writing discovered in modern times is the early Sumerian script which was pictographic. It took but a few centuries for this script to evolve into the cuneiform script (Fig. 69), which was the means of writing in all the ancient languages of Asia until it was finally replaced, millennia later, by the alphabet.

At first glance cuneiform script looks like an impossible hodgepodge of long, short, and just wedge-point markings (Fig. 70). There are hundreds of cuneiform symbols, and how on Earth the ancient scribes could remember how to write them and what they meant is baffling—but not more so than the Chinese language signs are to a non-Chinese. Three generations of scholars have been able to arrange the signs in a logical order and, as a result, have come up with lexicons and dictionaries of the ancient languages—Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Elamite and so on—that used cuneiform.

But modern science reveals that there was more than some logical order to creating such a diversity of signs.

Figure 69

Mathematicians, especially those dealing with graph theory—the study of points joined by lines—are familiar with the Ramsey Graph Theory, named for Frank P. Ramsey, a British mathematician who, in a paper read to the London Mathematical Society in 1928, suggested a method of calculating the number of various ways in which points can be connected and the shapes resulting therefrom.

Applied to games and riddles as well as to science and architecture, the theory offered by Ramsey made it possible to show, for example, that when six points representing six people are joined by either red lines (connecting any two who know each other) or blue lines (connecting any two who are strangers), the result will always be either a red or a blue triangle.

Figure 70

The results of calculating the possibilities for joining (or not joining) points can best be illustrated by some examples (Fig. 71). Underlying the resulting graphs (i.e., shapes) are the so-called Ramsey Numbers, which can be converted to graphs connecting a certain number of dots. I find that this results in dozens of “graphs” whose similarity to the Mesopotamian cuneiform signs is undeniable (Fig. 72).

The almost one hundred signs, only partly illustrated here, are simple graphs based on no more than a dozen Ramsey Numbers. So, if Enki or his daughter Nidaba, the Sumerian “goddess of writing,” had known as much as Frank Ramsey, they must have had no problem in devising for the Sumerian scribes a mathematically perfect system of cuneiform signs. “I will greatly bless thee, and I will exceedingly multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens,” Yahweh told Abraham.

And with this single verse, several of the elements of the knowledge that was lowered from heaven were expressed: speech, astronomy, and the “counting with numbers.” Modern science is well on its way to corroborating all that.

THE FRUITS OF EDEN

What was the Garden of Eden, remembered in the Bible for its variety of vegetation and as the place where still unnamed animals were shown to Adam?

Modem science teaches that Man’s best friends, the crops and animals we husband, were domesticated soon after 10000 B.C. Wheat and barley, dogs and sheep (to cite some examples) in their domesticated and cultivable forms appeared, then, within no more than two thousand years. This, it is admitted, is a fraction of the time that natural selection alone would require.

Sumerian texts offer an explanation. When the Anunnaki landed on Earth, they state, there were none of such “domesticated” crops and animals; it was the Anunnaki who brought them forth, in their “Creation Chamber.” Together with Lahar (“woolly cattle”) and Anshan (“grains”) they also brought forth “vegetation that luxuriates and multiplies.” It was all done in the Edin; and after The Adam was created, he was brought there to tend it all.

The amazing Garden of Eden was thus the bio-genetic farm or enclave where “domesticated” crops, fruits, and animals were brought forth.

After the Deluge (about thirteen thousand years ago) the Anunnaki provided Mankind with the crop and animal seeds, which they had preserved, to get started again. But this time, Man himself had to be the husbandman. The Bible confirms this and attributes to Noah the honor of having been the first husbandman. It also states that the first cultivated food after the Deluge was the grape.

Modern science confirms the grape’s antiquity; science has also discovered that besides being a nourishing food, the grape’s wine is a strong gastrointestinal medicine. So, when Noah drank the wine (in excess), he was, in a manner of speaking, taking his medicine.
 

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