Chapter Three
IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning
God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form and void
and darkness was upon the face of the deep
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.

"For generations this majestic outline of the manner in which our world was created has been at the core of Judaism as well of Christianity and the third monotheistic religion Islam, the latter two being outgrowths of the first. In the seventeenth century Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh in Ireland calculated from these opening verses of Genesis the precise day and even the moment of the world’s creation, in the year 4004 B.C. Many old editions of the Bible still carry Ussher’s chronology printed in the margins; many still believe that Earth and the Solar System of which it is a part are indeed no older than that. Unfortunately, this belief, known as Creationism, has taken on science as its adversary; and science, firmly wed to the Theory of Evolution, has met the challenge and joined the battle.

"It is regrettable that both sides pay little heed to what has been known for more than a century - that the creation tales of Genesis are edited and abbreviated versions of much more detailed Mesopotamian texts, which were in turn versions of an original Sumerian text. The battle lines between the Creationists and Evolutionists - a totally unwarranted demarcation as the evidence herewith presented will show - are undoubtedly more sharply etched by the principle of the separation between religion and state that is embodied in the U.S. Constitution. But such a separation is not the norm among the Earth’s nations (even in enlightened democracies such as England), nor was it the norm in antiquity, when the biblical verses were written down.

"Indeed, in ancient times the king was also the high priest, the state had a national god, the temples were the seat of scientific knowledge, and the priests were the servants. This was so because when civilization began, the gods who were worshipped - the focus of the act of being "religious" - were none other than the Anunnaki/Nefilim, who were the source of all manner of knowledge, alias science on Earth.

"The merging of state, religion, and science was nowhere more complete than in Babylon. There the original Sumerian Epic of Creation was translated and revised so that Marduk, the Babylonian national god, was assigned a celestial counterpart.... Nibiru/Marduk....

"....The decipherment of the writing on the clay tablets discovered in the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia more than a century ago led to the realization that texts existed that related biblical creation tales millennia before the Old Testament was compiled.

"....Is the biblical text of creation a religious document, its contents to be considered only a matter of faith to be believed or disbelieved; or it is a scientific document, imparting to us essential knowledge of how things began, in the heavens and on the Earth? This, of course, is the core of the ongoing argument between Creationists and Evolutionists. The two camps would have laid down their arms long ago were they to realize that what the editors and compilers of the Book of Genesis had done was no different from what the Babylonians had done: using the only scientific source of their time, those descendants of Abraham -scion of a royal-priestly family from the Sumerian capital Ur - also took the Epic of Creation, shortened and edited it, and made it the foundation of a national religion glorifying Yahweh "who is in the Heavens and on Earth."

"In Babylon, Marduk was a dual deity. Physically present.... he was worshipped as Ilu (translated "god" but literally meaning "the Lofty One").... On the other hand, "Marduk" was a celestial deity, a planetary god, who in the heavens assumed the attributes, role, and credit for the primordial creations that the Sumerians had attributed to Nibiru, the planet whose most frequent symbolic depiction was that of a winged disk. The Assyrians, replacing Marduk with their national god Ashur, combined the two aspects and depicted Ashur as a god within the winged disc.

"The Hebrew followed suit, preaching monotheism and recognizing - based on Sumerian scientific knowledge - the universality of God, ingeniously solved the problem of duality and of the multitude of the Anunnaki deities involved in the events on Earth by concocting a singular-but-plural deity, not an El (the Hebrew equivalent of Ilu) but Elohim - a creator who is plural (literally "Gods") and yet One.... The Hebrew were aware that the deity who could speak to Abraham and Moses and the celestial Lord whom the Sumerians called Nibiru were not one and the same scientifically, although all were part of a universal, everlasting, and omnipotent God - Elohim - in whose grand design for the universe the path for each planet is its predetermined "destiny," and what the Anunnaki had done on Earth was likewise a predetermined mission. Thus was the handiwork of a universal God manifest in Heaven and on Earth.

"....But to recognize this - that Genesis represents not just religion but also science - one must recognize the role of the Anunnaki and accept that the Sumerian texts are not "myth" but factual reports.... only by explaining, as I have repeatedly done in my writings, that the information on how things began - including how Man himself was created - indeed did not come from the memory of the Assyrians or Babylonians or Sumerians but from the knowledge and science of the Anunnaki/Nefilim. They too, of course could not "remember" how the Solar System was created or how Nibiru/Marduk invaded the Solar System, because they themselves were not created on their planet. But just as our scientists have a good notion of how the Solar System came about and even how the whole universe came into being (the favorite theory is that of the Big Bang), the Anunnaki/Nefilim, capable of space travel 450,000 years ago, surely had the capacity to arrive at sensible scenarios of creation; much more so since their planet, acting as a spacecraft that sailed past all the outer planets, gave them a chance at repeated close looks that were undoubtedly more extensive than our Voyager "peeks."

"....With the immensity of space as its canvas, here is how the Mesopotamian version began to draw the primordial picture:

When in the heights Heaven had not been named
And below earth had not been called,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their Begetter,
Mummu, and Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters were mingled together.
No reed had yet been formed,
No marshland had appeared.

"Even in traditional King James version, the biblical opening is more matter-of-fact, not an inspirational religious opus but a lesson in primordial science....

"....With this understanding, the reference in the Mesopotamian version to the mingling "waters" of Tiamat ceases to be allegorical and calls for a factual evaluation. It goes to the question of plentiful waters of Earth and the biblical assertion (correct, as we soon will realize) that when the Earth was formed it was completely covered by water. If water was so abundant even at the moment of Earth’s creation, then only if Tiamat was also a watery planet could the half that became Earth be water!

"The watery nature of Tehom/Tiamat is mentioned in various biblical references.

"....What was the "wind" of the Lord that "moved upon the face of the waters" of Tehom/Tiamat? Not the divine "Spirit" but the satellite of Nibiru/Marduk that, in the Mesopotamian texts, was called by that term! Those texts vividly described the flashing and lightning strokes that burst off Nibiru/Marduk as it closed in on Tiamat. Applying this knowledge to the biblical text, its correct reading emerges:

When, in the beginning,
The Lord created the Heaven and the Earth,
The Earth, not yet formed, was in the void,
and there was darkness upon Tiamat.
Then the Wind of the Lord swept upon its waters
and the Lord commanded, "Let there be lightning!"
and there was a bright light.

Then the Wind of the Lord swept upon its waters
and the Lord commanded, "Let there be lightning!"
and there was a bright light.

"The continuing narrative of Genesis does not describe the ensuing splitting of Tiamat or the break up of her host of satellites....

"....Genesis picks up the primordial tale here and describes the forming of the asteroid belt thus:

And Elohim said:
Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters
and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And Elohim made the Firmament,
dividing the waters which are under the Firmament
from the waters which are above the Firmament.
And Elohim called the Firmament "Heaven."

"....What separated the "upper waters" from the "lower waters," the Genesis text stresses, was the Raki’a; generally translated "Firmament," it literally means "Hammered-out Bracelet." Then Genesis goes on to explain that Elohim called the Raki’a, the so called Firmament, Shama’im, "the Heaven" - a name that in its first use in the Bible consists of the two words Sham and ma’im, meaning literally "where the waters were." In the creation tale of Genesis, "the Heaven" was a specific celestial location, where Tiamat and her waters had been, where the asteroid belt was hammered out.

"That happened, according to the Mesopotamian texts, when Nibiru/Marduk returned to the Place of Crossing - the second phase of the battle with Tiamat: "Day Two," if you wish, as the biblical narrative does.

Mr. Sitchin at this point explains also how the various planets and Nibiru/Marduk itself "begat" their satellites, moons or moonlets, as the "invader" was interacting with the planets in its orbit. Then he continues:

"....It has taken modern astronomy almost two centuries to find out what the Sumerians knew 6,000 years ago.

"Even with this knowledge, the biblical statement that the "Hammered-out Bracelet," the Shama’im - alias "the Heaven," divided the "waters which are below the Firmament" from the "waters which are above the Firmament" remained a puzzle. What, in god’s name, was the Bible talking about?

"....We know - don’t we? - that the asteroid belt had, indeed, as the ancient text reported, divided the planets into two groups. "Below" it are the Terrestrial, or inner Planets; "above" it the gaseous, or Outer Planets. But except for Earth the former had barren surfaces and the latter no surfaces at all, and the long-held wisdom was that neither group (again, excepting Earth) had any water.

"Well, as result of the missions of unmanned spacecraft to all the other planets except Pluto, we now know better.... Mercury.... is too small and too close to the Sun to have retained water, if it ever had any.

But Venus....

the careful analysis of the results of unmanned probes led the scientists to answer emphatically, yes. The topographic features revealed by radar mapping suggested erstwhile oceans and seas. That such bodies of water might indeed existed on Venus was indicated by the findings that the "hell-like atmosphere," as some of the scientists termed it, contained traces of water vapor.

"...."The lost oceans of Venus" can be traced in its rocks; that was the conclusion of a joint report of U.S. and Soviet scientists published in the May 1986 issue of Science. There was indeed water "below the Firmament," not only on Earth but also on Venus.

"The latest scientific discoveries have added Mars to the list of inner planets whose waters corroborate the ancient statement.

"The final NASA report after Viking missions (Mars: the Viking Discoveries) concluded that "Mars once had enough water to form a layer several meters deep over the whole surface of the planet." This was possible, it is now believed, because Mars (like Earth) wobbles slightly as it spins about its axis. This action results in significant climatic changes every 50,000 years....

"....What had started out as a dry and barren planet has emerged, in the past decade, as a planet where water was once abundant - not just passively lying about but flowing and gushing and shaping the planet’s features. Mars has joined Venus and Earth in corroborating the concept of the Sumerian texts of water "below the Firmament," on the inner planets.

	Captions of Mars. Viking Orbiter Mission

"The ancient assertion that the asteroid belt separated the waters that are below the Firmament from those that were above it implies that there was water on the celestial bodies that are located farther out.

"....Saturn itself, a gaseous giant.... has not yet been penetrated down to its surface.... But its various moons as well as its breathtaking rings, are now known to be made, if not wholly then in large part, of water ice and perhaps even liquid water.

"....What was originally described as "a carousel of bright icy particles" was revealed, however, by the data from Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1980 and 1981 to consist of chunks of ice ranging from boulder size to that of "big houses." We are seeing "a sea of sparkling ice," JPL’s scientists said. The ice, at some primordial time, had been liquid water.

"....Pioneer 11 reported in 1979 that the group of inner moons of Saturn.... appeared to be "icy bodies" . . . consisting largely of ice."

"....Voyager 1 also revealed that Saturn’s outer moons were ice covered....

Saturn - From Voyager Probes

A fantasy: Saturn and its rings

"Jupiter was investigated by Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 and by the two Voyagers.... somewhere farther down inside the thick atmosphere there is liquid water, the scientists have concluded.

"....the moons of Jupiter proved more fascinating, revealing, and surprising than the planet itself.... Io, the closest to Jupiter, revealed totally unexpected volcanic activity.... The consensus is that Jupiter Io has "some internal sources of water."

"Europa, like Io, appears to be a rocky body, but its somewhat lower density suggests that it may contain more internal water than Io.

"....Ganimede, the largest of Jupiter’s moons, appears to be covered with water ice mixed with rock, suggesting it has undergone moonquakes that have cracked its crust of frozen ice.... The fourth Galilean moon, Callisto.... also has an ice-rich crust; under it there are mush and liquid water surrounding a small, rocky core. Estimates are that Callisto is more than 50 percent water.

"....Modern science has confirmed the ancient assertion to the fullest: there indeed have been "waters above the Firmament."

"Jupiter is the Solar System’s largest planet - as large as 1,300 Earths. It contains some 90 percent of the mass of the complete planetary system of the Sun. As stated earlier, the Sumerians called it KI.SHAR, "Foremost of the Firm Lands," of the planetary bodies. Saturn, though smaller than Jupiter, occupies a much larger portion of the heavens because of its rings, whose "disk" has a diameter of 670,000 miles. The Sumerians called it AN.SHAR, "Foremost of the Heavens."

Evidently they knew what they were talking about.

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Chapter Four
THE MESSENGERS OF GENESIS
 

"In 1986 Mankind was treated to a once-in-a-lifetime event: the appearance of a messenger from the past, a Messenger of Genesis. It’s name was Halley’s comet.

"....The chain of scientific developments that led Edmund Halley, who became British Astronomer Royal in 1720, to determine, during the years 1695-1705, that the comet he observed in 1682 and that came to bear his name was a periodic one, the same that had been observed in 1531 and 1607, involved the promulgation of the laws of gravitation and celestial motion by Sir Isaac Newton and Newton’s consulting with Halley about his findings. Until then the theory regarding comets was that they crossed the heavens in straight lines, appearing at one end of the skies and disappearing in the other direction, never to be seen again. But based on Newtonian laws, Halley concluded that the curve described by comets is elliptical, eventually bringing these celestial bodies back to where they had been observed before.

"....Especially because of a comet’s small size, its orbit is easily perturbed by the gravitational pool of the planets it passes (this is especially true of Jupiter’s effect). Each time a comet nears the Sun, its frozen material comes to life; the comet develops a head and a long tail and begins to lose some of its material as it turns to gas and vapor. All these phenomena affect the comet’s orbit.... the actual orbit and its period must be recalculated each time the comet makes an appearance.

"....Most of the returning comets are short-period ones, the shortest known being that of Encke’s comet, which nears the Sun and then returns to a region slightly beyond the asteroid belt in a little over three years.

Mr. Sitchin names several other comets which are already known to astronomers, then he continues:

"....When Halley’s comet appeared on its next-to-last passage around the Sun, in 1910, its course and aspects had been well mapped out in advance. Still, the Great Comet of 1910, as it was then hailed, was awaited with great apprehension. There was fear that Earth or life on it would not survive the anticipated passage because Earth would be enveloped in the comet’s tail of poisonous gases.... As the comet reached its greatest magnitude and brilliance in May 10 1910, its tail stretching over more than half the vault of heaven King Edward VII of Great Britain died. On the European continent, a series of political upheavals culminated in the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Halley’s Comet as seen in 1986	Pass of Halley’s Comet through Pisces and Virgo Constellations in 1759
Spacecraft Giotto sent this photograph from Munich’s DFVLR Lab	From the Bayeux Tapestry, a warning of a bad Omen to King Harold (1066)

"....The year A.D. 66 is considered by astronomers one in which Halley’s comet made an appearance; they base their conclusions on at least two contemporary Chinese observations. That was the year in which the Jews of Judea launched their Great Revolt against Rome. The Jewish historian Josephus (Wars of the Jews, Book VI) blamed the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Holy Temple on the misinterpretation by the Jews of the heavenly signs that preceded the revolt: "a star resembling a sword which stood over the city, a comet that continued the whole year."

Besides other sightings, Mr. Sitchin mentions the following:

"....In April 1985, F.R. Stephenson, K.K.C. Yau and H. Hunger reported in Nature that a reexamination of Babylonian astronomical tablets that had been lying in the basement of the British Museum since their discovery in Mesopotamia more than a century ago, shows that the tablets recorded the appearance of extraordinary celestial bodies - probably comets, they (modern scholars) said - in the years 164 B.C. and 87 B.C. The periodicity of seventy-seven years suggested to these scholars that the unusual celestial bodies were Halley’s comet.

"The year 164 B.C.... it was the very year in which the Jews of Judea, under the leadership of the Maccabees, revolted against Greek-Syrian domination, recaptured Jerusalem, and purified the defiled Temple. The Temple rededication ceremony is celebrated to this day by Jews as the festival of Hanukkah ("Rededication").... The unusual celestial object.... is reported to have been seen in the Babylonian month of Kislimu, which is the Jewish month Kislev and, indeed, the one in which Hanukkah is celebrated.

"In another instance, the comparison by Josephus of the comet to a celestial sword (as it seems to be depicted also in the Bayeux tapestry) has led some scholars to suggest that the Angel of the Lord that King David saw "standing between the earth and heaven, having a sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem" (I Chronicles 21:16) might have been in reality Halley’s comet, sent by the Lord to punish the king for having conducted a prohibited census. The time of this incident, circa 1000 B.C., coincides with one of the years in which Halley’s comet should have appeared.

"In an article published in 1986, I pointed out that the Hebrew name for "comet" is Kokhav shavit, a "Scepter star." ... When the Israelites ended their wanderings in the desert after the Exodus and began the conquest of Canaan, the Moabite king summoned Bilam (the seer) to curse the Israelites. But Bilam realizing that the Israelite advance was divinely ordained, blessed them instead. He did so, he explained (Numbers 24:17), because he was shown a celestial vision:

I see it, though not now;
I behold it, though it is not near;
A star of Jacob did course
A scepter of Israel did arise.

"....If, in biblical times, the comet we call Halley’s was considered the Scepter Star of Israel, it could explain why the Jewish revolts of 164 B.C. and A.D. 66 were timed to coincide with the comet’s appearances....

"....How far back does this messenger of the past go? According to the Sumerian creation epics, it goes all the way back to the time of the Celestial Battle. Halley’s comet and its like are truly the Messengers of Genesis.

"....The planets orbit the Sun in the same direction as did the original nebula; so do their satellites, or moons; so should also the debris that either did not coalesce or that resulted from the disintegration of bodies such as comets and asteroids. Everything must keep going anticlockwise. Everything must also remain within the plane of the original disk, which is called the Ecliptic.

"Nibiru/Marduk did not conform to all that. Its orbit, as previously reviewed, was retrograde - in the opposite direction, clockwise....

"....Where do comets come from, and what causes their odd orbits, of which the retrograde direction is the oddest in astronomer’s eyes?

After presenting several theories, especially that of the "Oort Cloud" (Jan Oort) who sums up his study:

"The existence of the huge cloud of comets finds a natural explanation if comets (and meteorites) are considered as minor planets escaped, at an early stage of the planetary system, from the ring of asteroids.

Mr. Sitchin continues:

"It all begins to sound like the Enuma elish. . . .

"A major and outspoken study on the subject was made public in 1978 by Thomas C. Van Flandern of the U.S. naval Observatory, Washington, D.C. (Icarus, 36)....

"Summarizing his findings, Van Flandern said thus in 1978:

"The principal conclusion of this paper is that the comets originated in a breakup event in the inner solar system. In all probability it was the same event which gave rise to the asteroid belt and which produced most of the meteors visible today."

"He said that it was less certain that the same "breakup event" may have also given birth to the satellites of Mars and the outer satellites of Jupiter, and he estimated that the "breakup event" occurred five million years ago. He has no doubt, however, that the "breakup event" took place "in the asteroid belt." Physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the resulting celestial bodies, he stated emphatically, indicate "that a large planet did disintegrate" where the asteroid belt is today.

""The most frequently asked question about this scenario" Van Flandern wrote, "is ’how can a planet blow up?’ . . . There is presently," he conceded, "no satisfactory answer to this question."

"No satisfactory answer, that is, except the Sumerian one: the tale of Tiamat and Nibiru/Marduk, the Celestial Battle, the breakup of half of Tiamat, the annihilation of its moons (except for "Kingu"), and the forcing of their remains into a retrograde orbit....

Many more theories by various scholars follow at this point, regarding the mass of the supposed destroyed planet, after which Mr. Sitchin adds:

"....By the acknowledgment of the existence of Nibiru and his periodic return to the Place of the Battle, the puzzle of the "missing matter" finds a solution. It also addresses the theories that place the accretions of mass by Jupiter at a relative recent time (millions, not billions, of years ago). Depending on where Jupiter was at the times of Nibiru’s perihelion, the accretion might have occurred during various passages of Nibiru and not necessarily as a one-and-only event at the time of the catastrophic breakup of Tiamat. Indeed, spectrographic studies of asteroids reveal that some of them "were heated within the first few hundred million years after the origin of the solar system" by heat so intense as to melt them; "iron sank to their centers, forming strong stony-iron cores, while basaltic lavas floated to their surface, producing minor planets like Vesta" (Mc Graw-Hill Encyclopedia of Astronomy). The suggested time of the catastrophe is the very time indicated in The 12^th Planet - some 500 million years after the formation of the Solar System.

"Recent scientific advances in astronomy and astrophysics go beyond corroborating the Sumerian cosmogony in regard to the celestial collision as the common origin of the comets and the asteroids, the site of that collision (where the remains of the asteroid belt still orbit) or even the time of the catastrophic event (about 4 billion years ago). They also corroborate the ancient texts in the vital matter of water.

"....Tiamat was described as a "watery monster," and the Mesopotamian texts speak of the handling of her waters by Nibiru/Marduk:

Half of her he stretched as a ceiling to the Sky,
As a bar at the Place of Crossing he posted it to guard;
Not to allow her waters to escape was its command.

"The concept of an asteroid belt not only as a divider between the waters of the planet above and below it but also as a "guardian" of Tiamat’s own waters is echoed in the biblical verses of Genesis, where the explanation is given that the "Hammered-out bracelet" was also called Shama’im, the place "where the waters were."

....An example is found in Psalm 104, which depicts the Creator as the Lord

Who has stretched out the Shama’im as a curtain,
Who in the waters for his ascents put a ceiling.

"These verses are almost a word-for-word copy of the verses in Enuma elish; in both instances, the placing of the asteroid belt "where the waters were."

"....If the asteroids and comets are those remains, should not they also contain water?

"What would have been a preposterous suggestion when these objects were deemed "chunks of debris" and "flying sand-banks" has turned out, as the result of recent discoveries, to be not so preposterous: the asteroids are celestial objects in which water - yes, water - is a major component.

Mr. Sitchin mentions the asteroid Ceres, first to be discovered, and the celestial body designated 2060 Chiron in which both of them traces of water were found. Mr. Sitchin then continues:

"Comet Kohoutek (1974) was studied not only from Earth but also with rockets, from orbiting manned spacecraft (Skylab) and from the Mariner 10 spacecraft that was on its way to Venus and Mercury...

 

"The water finding, as well as that of two complex molecules in the comet’s tail, are the most significant to date," stated Stephen P. Moran, who directed the scientific project for NASA.

"....Subsequent cometary observations confirmed these findings.

Above: Comet Kohoutek   Right: Skylab

Mr. Sitchin returns to mentioning comet Halley and several studies. He ends with the following:

"And in December 1986, scientists at the John Hopkins University announced that evaluation of data collected in March 1986 by the small Earth-orbiting satellite IUE (International Ultraviolet Explorer) revealed an explosion on Halley’s Comet that blew 100 cubic feet of ice out of the comet’s nucleus.

"There was water everywhere on these Messengers of Genesis!

"....In the discoveries concerning the comets and the asteroids, something else came to life: the ancient knowledge of Sumer.

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Chapter Five
GAIA: THE CLEAVED PLANET
 

"Why do we call our planet "Earth"?

"....The answer lies in the Sumerian texts that relate the arrival of the first group of Anunnaki/Nephilim on Earth.... They splashed down in the Arabian Sea, and waded ashore to the edge of the marshlands that, after the climate warmed up, became the Persian Gulf. And at the head of the marshlands they established their first settlement on a new planet by its name E.RI.DU - "Home in the Faraway"....

"And so it was that in time the whole settled planet came to be called after that first settlement - Erde [German], Erthe [Middle English], Earth. To this day, whenever we call our planet by its name, we invoke the memory of that first settlement on Earth; unknowingly, we remember Eridu and honour the first group of Anunnaki who established it.

"After Ea had completed the establishment of the first five of the seven original settlements of the Anunnaki, he was given the title/epithet EN.KI, "Lord of Earth." But the term KI, as a root or verb, was applied to the planet called "Earth" for a reason. It conveyed the meaning "to cut off, to sever, to hollow out." Its derivatives illustrate the concept: KI.LA meant "excavation," KI.MAH "tomb," KI.IN.DAR "crevice, fissure." In Sumerian astronomical texts the term KI was prefixed with the determinative MUL ("celestial body"). And thus when they spoke of mul.KI, they conveyed the meaning, "the celestial body that had been cleaved apart."

"By calling Earth KI, the Sumerians thus invoked their cosmogony - the tale of the Celestial Battle and the cleaving of Tiamat.

"....The intriguing fact is that over time (the Sumerian civilization was two thousand years old by the time Babylon arose) the pronunciation of the term ki changed to gi, or sometimes ge. It was so carried into the Akkadian and its linguistic branches (Babylonian, Assyrian, Hebrew), at all times retaining its geographic or topographic connotation as a cleavage, a ravine, a deep valley. Thus the biblical term that through Greek translations of the Bible is read Gehenna stems from the Hebrew Gai-Hinnom, the crevice-like narrow ravine outside Jerusalem named after Hinnom, where divine retribution shall befall the sinners via an erupting subterranean fire on Judgement Day.

"We have been taught in school that the component geo in all the scientific terms applied to Earth sciences - geo-graphy, geo-metry, geo-logy, and so on - comes from the Greek Gaia (or Gaea), their name for the goddess of Earth. We were not taught where the Greeks picked up this term or what its real meaning was. The answer is, from the Sumerian KI or GI.

"....How did the Cleaved Planet look in the aftermath of the Celestial Battle, now orbiting as Gaia/Earth? On one side there were the firm lands that had formed the crust of Tiamat; on the other side there was a hollow, an immense cleft into which the waters of the erstwhile Tiamat must have poured. As Hesiod put it, Gaia (the half equivalent to Heaven) on one side "brought forth long hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs"; and on the other side "she bare Pontus, the fruitless deep with its raging swell."

"This is the same picture of the cleaved planet provided by the Book of Genesis:

And Elohim said,
"Let the waters under the heaven
be gathered together into one place,
and let the dry land appear."
And it was so.
And Elohim called the dry land "Earth"
and the gathered-together water He called "Seas."

"Earth, the new Gaia, was taking shape.

"Three thousand years separated Hesiod from the time when the Sumerian civilization had blossomed out; and it is clear that through those millennia ancient peoples, including the authors or compilers of the Book of Genesis, accepted the Sumerian cosmogony. Called nowadays "myth," "legend," or "religious beliefs," in those previous millennia it was science - knowledge, the Sumerian asserted, bestowed by the Anunnaki.

Mr. Sitchin at this point explains what modern science has to say today. Then he continues:

"....Ever since the extensive probes of the Moon and Mars in the 1960s and 1970s, geophysicists have been puzzled by the paucity of the Earth’s crust. The crusts of the Moon and of Mars comprise 10 percent of their masses, but the Earth’s crust comprises less than one half or 1 percent of the Earth’s land mass.

"....By analyzing shockwaves from earthquakes, they concluded that material that belongs in the crust has sunk down and lies some 250 miles below the Earth’s surface. There is enough crustal material there, these scientists estimated, to increase the thickness of the Earth’s crust tenfold. But even so, it would have given Earth a crust comprising no more than about 4 percent of its landmass.... The theory still leaves unanswered the question of what force caused the crustal material, which is lighter than the mantle’s material, to "dive" - in the words of the report - hundreds of miles into the Earth’s interior....

"....Another abnormality of the Earth’s crust is that it is not uniform....

"....There are other differences between the Earth’s crust where the continents are and where the oceans are.... (These queries are explained in Mr. Sitchin’s book).

He then continues:

Meteor Crater, Arizona, USA

"....Scientists are still hard put to explain the gap of about 500 million years between the age of the Earth (which meteor fragments, such as those found at Meteor Crater in Arizona, show to be 4.6 billion years) and the age of the oldest rocks thus far found; but no matter what the explanation, the fact that Earth had its continental crust at least 4 billion years ago is by now undisputed. On the other hand, no part of the oceanic crust has been found to be more than 200 million years old.

"This is a tremendous difference that no amount of speculation about rising and sinking continents, forming and vanishing seas can explain....

"....The differences between the continental and oceanic crusts must have been even greater in earlier times, because the continental crust is constantly eroded by the forces of nature, and a good deal of the eroded solids are carried into the oceanic basins, increasing the thickness of the oceanic crust. Further more, the oceanic crust is constantly enhanced by the upwelling of molten basaltic rocks and silicates that flow up from the mantle through faults in the sea floor. This process, which puts down ever-new layers of oceanic crust, has been going on for 200 million years, giving the oceanic crust its present form. What was there at the bottom of the seas before then? Was there no crust at all, just a gaping "wound" in the Earth’s surface? And is the ongoing oceanic crust formation akin to the process of blood clotting, where the skin is pierced and wounded?

"Is Gaia - a living planet - trying to heal her wounds?

"The most obvious place of the surface of the Earth where it was so "wounded" is the Pacific Ocean....

"....What can be said with certainty is that the extent of the gouging was more extensive, affecting a vastly greater part of the planet’s surface. The Pacific Ocean at present occupies about a third of Earth’s surface; but (as far as can be ascertained for the past 200 millions years) it has been shrinking. The reason for the shrinkage is that the continents flanking it - the Americas on the east, Asia and Australia on the west - are moving closer to each other, squeezing out the Pacific slowly but relentlessly, reducing its size inch by inch year by year.

"The science and explanations dealing with this process have come to be known as the Theory of Plate Tectonics....

"....The new science of plate tectonics, it is now generally recognized, owes its beginning to Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist.... [1915].... Wegener came up with the notion of Pangaea - a supercontinent, a single huge landmass into which he could fit all the present continental masses like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Pangaea, which covered about one half of the globe, Wegener suggested, was surrounded by the primeval Pacific Ocean....

Mr. Sitchin explains the theories of the drift of the landmass, and then he continues:

"....How long has continental drift been going on? Was there a Pangaea?....

"....whether a superocean surrounded a single mass of dry land or bodies of water first stretched between several dry lands, is, in the words of Moorbath, like the chicken-and-the-egg argument: "Which came first, the continents or the oceans?"

"Modern science thus confirms the scientific notions that were expressed in the ancient texts, but it cannot see far enough back to resolve the landmass/ocean sequence. If every modern scientific discovery seems to have corroborated this or that aspect of ancient knowledge, why not also accept the ancient answer in this instance: that the waters covered the face of the Earth and - on the third "day," or phase - were "gathered into" one side of the Earth to reveal the dry land. Was the uncovered dry land made up of isolated continents or one supercontinent, a Pangaea? Although it really matters not as far as the corroboration of ancient knowledge is concerned, it is interesting to note that Greek notions of Earth, although they led to a belief that the Earth was disc-like rather than a globe, envisioned it as a landmass with a solid foundation surrounded by waters. This notion must have drawn on earlier and more accurate knowledge, as most of Greek science did....

"....In addition to the term Eretz which means both planet "Earth" and "earth, ground," the narrative in Genesis employs the term Yabashah - literally, "the dried-out landmass" - when it states that the waters "were gathered together into one place" to let the Yabashah appear. But throughout the Old Testament another term, Tebel, is frequently used to denote that part of Earth that is habitable, arable, and useful to Mankind (including being a source of ores). The term Tebel - usually translated as either "the earth" or "the world" - is mostly employed to indicate the part of Earth distinct from its watery portions; the "foundations" of this Tebel were in juxtaposition to the sea basins. This was best expressed in the Song of David (2 Samuel 22:16 and Psalm 18:16)

"....With what we know today about the "foundations of the Earth," the word Tebel clearly conveys the concept of continents whose foundations - tectonic plates - are laid in the midst of the waters. What a thrill to discover the latest geophysical theories echoed in a 3,000-year-old psalm!

"....Why is the crustal evidence that can be found not older than about 4 billion years, rather than the 4.6 billion years that is the presumed age of the Earth and the Solar System?.... In the discussion of the origins of Earth’s atmosphere, the consensus was that it did not result from a "continuous outgassing" through volcanic activity but was (in the words of Raymond Siever of Harvard University) the result of "a rather early and rather large outgassing episode . . . a great big belch of the gases that are now characteristic of the Earth’s atmosphere and sediments." This "big belch" was also dated to the same time as the catastrophe recorded by the rocks.

"....the findings of modern science have corroborated the ancient knowledge. They have also led scientists from all disciplines to conclude that the only explanation of the way in which Earth’s landmasses, oceans and atmosphere have evolved is to assume a cataclysm occurring about four billion years ago - about half a billion years after the initial formation or Earth as part of the Solar System.

"What was that cataclysm? Mankind has possessed the Sumerian answer for six thousand years: the Celestial Battle between Nibiru/Marduk and Tiamat.

"In that Sumerian cosmogony, the members of the Solar System were depicted as celestial gods, male and female, whose creation was compared to birth, whose existence was that of living creatures.
 

"Mother Earth" viewed from space

"....For a long time this view of the planets, and especially of Tiamat, as living entities that could be born and could die has been dismissed as primitive paganism. But the exploration of the planetary system in recent decades has, in fact, revealed words for which the word "alive" has been repeatedly used. That Earth itself is a living planet  was forcefully put forth as the Gaia Hypothesis by James E. Lovelock in the 1970s (Gaia - A New Look at Life on Earth) and was most reinforced by him in The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. It is a hypothesis that views the Earth and the life that has evolved upon it as a single organism; Earth is not just an inanimate globe upon which there is life; it is a coherent if complex body that is itself alive through its mass and land surface, its oceans and atmosphere, and through the flora and fauna which it sustains and in which turn sustain Earth. "The largest living creature on Earth," Lovelock wrote, "is the Earth itself." And in that he admitted, he was revisiting the ancient "concept of Mother Earth, or as the Greeks called her long ago, Gaia."

"But in fact he had gone back to Sumerian times, to their ancient knowledge of the planet that was cleaved apart.

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