Zecharia Sitchin
Zecharia Sitchin (1920 July 11 [3] – 2010 October 9 [4]) translated ancient cuneiform texts written on clay tablets by the Sumerian into English (video).
However, Wholly Science explains the depiction on cylinder seal
VA 243 strongly different than Sitchin did (link).
Zecharia Sitchin (1920 July 11 [3] – 2010 October 9 [4]) translated ancient cuneiform texts written on clay tablets by the Sumerian into English (video).
However, Wholly Science explains the depiction on cylinder seal
VA 243 strongly different than Sitchin did (link).
On this page read the complete book
"Genesis Revisited"
"Genesis Revisited"
Genesis Revisited
is a mind - boggling revelation
contrary to current theories
about the origins of humankind and the solar system.
is a mind - boggling revelation
contrary to current theories
about the origins of humankind and the solar system.
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Genesis Revisited / A Short Review
https://middleofthepacific.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/
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https://middleofthepacific.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/
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Genesis Revisited / Science and Myth
Are they one and the same?
• Has a prehistoric space base on Mars been reactivated?
• Was Adam the first test-tube baby? And was Eve the original beneficiary of organ transplant surgery?
• Did nuclear weapons destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?
• Did computer printouts exist 5,000 years ago?
How were the ancients able to accurately describe details about our solar system that are only now being revealed by space probes?
Is humankind, in catching up with ancient knowledge, also repeating ancient incidents as that of the Tower of Babel?
The awesome answers are all here, fully documented with the latest scientific findings, in this important companion volume to The Earth Chronicles series.
Having presented evidence of an additional planet as well as voluminous information about the other planets in our solar system, Zecharia Sitchin now shows how the discoveries of modern astrophysics, astronomy, and genetics exactly parallel what has already been revealed in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and biblical texts regarding the enigmas of the heavens, Earth, and the creation of life. Genesis Revisited is a mind-boggling revelation sure to overturn current theories about the origins of humankind and the solar system.
Modern Technology . . . or Knowledge of the Ancients? Space travel . . . Genetic engineering . . . Computer science . . . Astounding achievements as new as tomorrow. But stunning recent evidence proves that as these ultramodern advances were known to our forfathers millions of yrsterdays ago . . . as early as 3,000 years before the birth of Christ!
In this remarkable companion volume to his landmark EARTH CHRONICLES series, author Zecharia Sitchin reexamines the teachings of the ancients in the light of mankind's latest scientific discoveries -- and uncovers breathtaking, never-before-revealed facts that challenge long-held, conventional beliefs about our planet and our species.
This is probably the best of all Sitchin's work, since it essentially summarises the 5 Earth Chronicles books. The basic hypothesis is the same - Earth was probably visited in the distant past by extraterrestials who genetically engineered Man as a mining slave. Sounds whacky yes, but Sitchin's scholarship is unchallenged by most. For those who don't have the patience to read his 6 or 7 other books on the subject, this one will do nicely.
Read it with an open mind and remember, what he says at least presents a scientific alternative to blind acceptance that Man was divinely created. And for those who want to pursue more about Man's past, read "Forbidden Archaeology'' by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson. Your worldview will never be the same again.
• Has a prehistoric space base on Mars been reactivated?
• Was Adam the first test-tube baby? And was Eve the original beneficiary of organ transplant surgery?
• Did nuclear weapons destroy Sodom and Gomorrah?
• Did computer printouts exist 5,000 years ago?
How were the ancients able to accurately describe details about our solar system that are only now being revealed by space probes?
Is humankind, in catching up with ancient knowledge, also repeating ancient incidents as that of the Tower of Babel?
The awesome answers are all here, fully documented with the latest scientific findings, in this important companion volume to The Earth Chronicles series.
Having presented evidence of an additional planet as well as voluminous information about the other planets in our solar system, Zecharia Sitchin now shows how the discoveries of modern astrophysics, astronomy, and genetics exactly parallel what has already been revealed in ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, and biblical texts regarding the enigmas of the heavens, Earth, and the creation of life. Genesis Revisited is a mind-boggling revelation sure to overturn current theories about the origins of humankind and the solar system.
Modern Technology . . . or Knowledge of the Ancients? Space travel . . . Genetic engineering . . . Computer science . . . Astounding achievements as new as tomorrow. But stunning recent evidence proves that as these ultramodern advances were known to our forfathers millions of yrsterdays ago . . . as early as 3,000 years before the birth of Christ!
In this remarkable companion volume to his landmark EARTH CHRONICLES series, author Zecharia Sitchin reexamines the teachings of the ancients in the light of mankind's latest scientific discoveries -- and uncovers breathtaking, never-before-revealed facts that challenge long-held, conventional beliefs about our planet and our species.
This is probably the best of all Sitchin's work, since it essentially summarises the 5 Earth Chronicles books. The basic hypothesis is the same - Earth was probably visited in the distant past by extraterrestials who genetically engineered Man as a mining slave. Sounds whacky yes, but Sitchin's scholarship is unchallenged by most. For those who don't have the patience to read his 6 or 7 other books on the subject, this one will do nicely.
Read it with an open mind and remember, what he says at least presents a scientific alternative to blind acceptance that Man was divinely created. And for those who want to pursue more about Man's past, read "Forbidden Archaeology'' by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson. Your worldview will never be the same again.
You Can Read The Complete Book
On This Page
Genesis Revisited / Without Pictures
On This Page
Genesis Revisited / Without Pictures
TABLE OF CONTENTS / 311 Pages Below
Foreword 1
FOREWORD
The last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed an upsurge of human knowledge that boggles the mind. Our ad- vances in every field of science and technology are no longer measured in centuries or even decades but in years and even months, and they seem to surpass in attainments and scope anything that Man has achieved in the past.
But is it possible that Mankind has come out of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; reached the Age of Enlightenment; experienced the Industrial Revolution; and entered the era of high-tech, genetic engineering, and space flight—only to catch up with ancient knowledge?
For many generations the Bible and its teachings have served as an anchor for a searching Mankind, but modern science appeared to have cast us ail adrift, especially in the confron- tation between Evolution and Creationism. In this volume it will be shown that the conflict is baseless; that the Book of Genesis and its sources reflect the highest levels of scientific knowledge.
Is it possible, then, that what our civilization is discovering today about our planet Earth and about our corner of the uni- verse, the heavens, is only a drama that can be called "Genesis Revisited"—only a rediscovery of what had been known to a much earlier civilization, on Earth and on another planet?
The question is not one of mere scientific curiosity; it goes to the core of Mankind's existence, its origin, and its destiny. It involves the Earth's future as a viable planet because it concerns events in Earth's past; it deals with where we are going because it reveals where we have come from. And the answers, as we shall see, lead to inevitable conclusions that some consider too incredible to accept and others too awesome to face.
1
The Host of Heaven
In the beginning
God created the Heaven and the Earth.
The very concept of a beginning of all things is basic to modern astronomy and astrophysics. The statement that there was a void and chaos before there was order conforms to the very latest theories that chaos, not permanent stability, rules the universe. And then there is the statement about the bolt of light that began the process of creation.
Was this a reference to the Big Bang, the theory according to which the universe was created from a primordial explosion, a burst of energy in the form of light, that sent the matter from which stars and planets and rocks and human beings are formed flying in all directions and creating the wonders we see in the heavens and on Earth? Some scientists, inspired by the insights of our most inspiring source, have thought so. But then, how did ancient Man know the Big Bang theory so long ago? Or was this biblical tale the description of matters closer to home, of how our own little planet Earth and the heavenly zone called the Firmament, or "hammered-out bracelet," were formed?
Indeed, how did ancient Man come to have a cosmogony at all? How much did he really know, and how did he know it?
It is only appropriate that we begin the quest for answers where the events began to unfold—in the heavens; where also, from time immemorial, Man has felt that his origins, higher values—God, if you will—are to be found. As thrilling as discoveries made by the use of microscopes are, it is what telescopes enable us to see that fills us with the realization of the grandeur of nature and the universe. Of all recent advances, the most impressive have undoubtedly been the discoveries in the heavens surrounding our planet. And what staggering ad-
3
4 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure I
vances they have been! In a mere few decades we Earthlings have soared off the face of our planet; roamed Earth's skies hundreds of miles above its surface; landed on its solitary satellite, the Moon; and sent an array of unmanned spacecraft to probe our celestial neighbors, discovering vibrant and active worlds dazzling in their colors, features, makeup, satellites, rings. For the first time, perhaps, we can grasp the meaning and feel the scope of the Psalmist's words:
The heavens bespeak the glory of the Lord and the vault of heaven reveals His handiwork.
A fantastic era of planetary exploration came to a magnificent climax when, in August 1989, the unmanned spacecraft des- ignated Voyager 2 flew by distant Neptune and sent back to Earth pictures and other data. Weighing just about a ton but ingeniously packed with television cameras, sensing and meas- uring equipment, a power source based on nuclear decay, trans- mitting antennas, and tiny computers (Fig. 1), it sent back whisperlike pulses that required more than four hours to reach Earth even at the speed of light. On Earth the pulses were captured by an array of radiotelescopes that form the Deep Space Network of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); then the faint signals were translated by electronic wizardry into photographs, charts, and other forms of data at the sophisticated facilities of the Jet Propulsion
The Host of Heaven 5
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which managed the project for NASA.
Launched in August 1977, twelve years before this final mission—the visit to Neptune—was accomplished. Voyager 2 and its companion. Voyager I, were originally intended to reach and scan only Jupiter and Saturn and augment data ob- tained earlier about those two gaseous giants by the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 unmanned spacecraft. But with remarkable ingenuity and skill, the JPL scientists and technicians took advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets and, using the gravitational forces of these planets as "slingshots," man- aged to thrust Voyager 2 first from Saturn to Uranus and then from Uranus to Neptune (Fig. 2).
Figure 2
Thus it was that for several days at the end of August 1989, headlines concerning another world pushed aside the usual news of armed conflicts, political upheavals, sports results, and market reports that make up Mankind's daily fare. For a few days the world we call Earth took time out to watch another world; we, Earthlings, were glued to our television sets, thrilled by closeup pictures of another planet, the one we call Neptune.
6 GENESIS REVISITED
As the dazzling images of an aquamarine globe appeared on our television screens, the commentators stressed repeatedly that this was the first time that Man on Earth had ever really been able to see this planet, which even with the best Earth- based telescopes is visible only as a dimly lit spot in the dark- ness of space almost three billion miles from us. They reminded the viewers that Neptune was discovered only in 1846, after perturbations in the orbit of the somewhat nearer planet Uranus indicated the existence of another celestial body beyond it. They reminded us that no one before that—neither Sir Isaac Newton nor Johannes Kepler, who between them discovered and laid down the laws of celestial motion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; neither Copernicus, who in the six- teenth century determined that the Sun, not the Earth, was in the center of our planetary system, nor Galileo, who a century later used a telescope to announce that Jupiter had four moons—no great astronomer until the mid-nineteenth century and certainly no one in earlier times knew of Neptune. And thus not only the average TV viewer but the astronomers them- selves were about to see what had been unseen before—it would be the first time we would learn the true hues and makeup of Neptune.
But two months before the August encounter, I had written an article for a number of U. S., European, and South American monthlies contradicting these long-held notions: Neptune was known in antiquity, I wrote; and the discoveries that were about to be made would only confirm ancient knowledge. Neptune, I predicted, would be blue-green, watery, and have patches the color of "swamplike vegetation"!
The electronic signals from Voyager 2 confirmed all that and more. They revealed a beautiful blue-green, aquamarine planet embraced by an atmosphere of helium, hydrogen, and methane gases, swept by swirling, high-velocity winds that make Earth's hurricanes look timid. Below this atmosphere there appear mysterious giant "smudges" whose coloration is sometimes darker blue and sometimes greenish yellow, perhaps depending on the angle at which sunlight strikes them. As expected, the atmospheric and surface temperatures are below freezing, but unexpectedly Neptune was found to emit heat that emanates from within the planet. Contrary to the previous
The Host of Heaven 7
consideration of Neptune as being a "gaseous" planet, it was determined by Voyager 2 to have a rocky core above which there floats, in the words of the JPL scientists, "a slurry mixture of water ice." This watery layer, circling the rocky core as the planet revolves in its sixteen-hour day, acts as a dynamo that creates a sizable magnetic field.
This beautiful planet (see Neptune, back cover) was found to be encircled by several rings made up of boulders, rocks, and dust and is orbited by at least eight satellites, or moons. Of the latter, the largest, Triton, proved no less spectacular than its planetary master. Voyager 2 confirmed the retrograde mo- tion of this small celestial body (almost the size of Earth's Moon): it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to that of the coursing of Neptune and all other known planets in our Solar System, not anticlockwise as they do but clockwise. Besides its very existence, its approximate size, and its retrograde mo- tion, astronomers knew nothing else of Triton. Voyager 2 re- vealed it to be a "blue moon," an appearance resulting from methane in Triton's atmosphere. The surface of Triton showed through the thin atmosphere—a pinkish gray surface with rug- ged, mountainous features on one side and smooth, almost craterless features on the other side. Close-up pictures sug- gested recent volcanic activity but of a very odd kind: what the active, hot interior of this celestial body spews out is not molten lava but jets of slushy ice. Even preliminary assess- ments indicated that Triton had flowing water in its past, quite possibly even lakes that may have existed on the surface until relatively recent times, in geological terms. The astronomers had no immediate explanation for "double-tracked ridge lines" that run straight for hundreds of miles and, at one or even two points, intersect at what appears to be right angles, suggesting rectangular areas (Fig. 3).
The discoveries thus fully confirmed my prediction: Neptune is indeed blue-green; it is made up in great part of water; and it does have patches whose coloration looks like "swamplike vegetation." This last tantalizing aspect may bespeak more than a color code if the full implication of the discoveries on Triton is taken into consideration: there, "darker patches with brighter halos" have suggested to the scientists of NASA the existence of "deep pools of organic sludge." Bob Davis re-
8 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 3
The Host of Heaven 9
ported from Pasadena to The Wall Street Journal that Triton, whose atmosphere contains as much nitrogen as Earth's, may be spewing out from its active volcanoes not only gases and water ice but also '"organic material, carbon-based compounds which apparently coat parts of Triton."
Such gratifying and overwhelming corroboration of my pre- diction was not the result of a mere lucky guess. It goes back to 1976 when The 12th Planet, my first book in The Earth Chronicles series, was published. Basing my conclusions on millennia-old Sumerian texts, I had asked rhetorically: "When we probe Neptune someday, will we discover that its persistent association with waters is due to the watery swamps" that had once been seen there?
This was published, and obviously written, a year before Voyager 2 was even launched and was restated by me in an article two months before the Neptune encounter.
How could I be so sure, on the eve of Voyager's encounter with Neptune, that my 1976 prediction would be corrobo- rated—how dared I take the chance that my predictions would be disproved within weeks after submitting my article? My certainty was based on what happened in January 1986, when Voyager 2 flew by the planet Uranus.
Although somewhat closer to us—Uranus is "only" about two billion miles away—it lies so far beyond Saturn that it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It was discovered in 1781 by Frederick Wilhelm Herschel, a musician turned amateur astronomer, only after the telescope was perfected. At the time of its discovery and to this day, Uranus has been hailed as the first planet w/iknown in antiquity to be discovered in modern times; for, it has been held, the ancient peoples knew of and venerated the Sun, the Moon, and only five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which they be- lieved moved around the Earth in the "vault of heaven"; noth- ing could be seen or known beyond Saturn.
But the very evidence gathered by Voyager 2 at Uranus proved the opposite: that at one time a certain ancient people did know about Uranus, and about Neptune, and even about the more-distant Pluto!
Scientists are still analyzing the photographs and data from Uranus and its amazing moons, seeking answers to endless
10 GENESIS REVISITED
Plate A
puzzles. Why does Uranus lie on its side, as though it was hit by another large celestial object in a collision? Why do its winds blow in a retrograde direction, contrary to what is normal in the Solar System? Why is its temperature on the side that is hidden from the Sun the same as on the side facing the Sun? And what shaped the unusual features and formations on some of the Uranian moons? Especially intriguing is the moon called Miranda, "one of the most enigmatic objects in the Solar Sys-
The Host of Heaven 11
Figure 4
tern," in the words of NASA's astronomers, where an elevated, flattened-out plateau is delineated by 100-mile-long escarp- ments that form a right angle (a feature nicknamed "the Chev- ron" by the astronomers), and where, on both sides of this plateau, there appear elliptical features that look like racetracks ploughed over by concentric furrows (Plate A and Fig. 4).
Two phenomena, however, stand out as the major discov- eries regarding Uranus, distinguishing it from other planets. One is its color. With the aid of Earth-based telescopes and unmanned spacecraft we have become familiar with the gray- brown of Mercury, the sulphur-colored haze that envelops Ve- nus, the reddish Mars, the multihued red-brown-yellow Jupiter and Saturn. But as the breathtaking images of Uranus began
12 GENESIS REVISITED
to appear on television screens in January 1986, its most striking feature was its greenish blue color—a color totally different from that of all the previous planets seen (see Uranus, back cover).
The other different and unexpected finding had to do with what Uranus is made of. Defying earlier assumptions by astron- omers that Uranus is a totally "gaseous" planet like the giants Jupiter and Saturn, it was found by Voyager 2 to be covered not by gases but by water; not just a sheet of frozen ice on its surface but an ocean of water. A gaseous atmosphere, it was found, in- deed enshrouds the planet; but below it there churns an immense layer—6,000 miles thick!—of "super-heated water, its tempera- ture as high as 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit" (in the words of JPL analysts). This layer of liquid, hot water surrounds a molten rocky core where radioactive elements (or other, unknown pro- cesses) produce the immense internal heat.
As the images of Uranus grew bigger on the TV screen the closer Voyager 2 neared the planet, the moderator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory drew attention to its unusual green-blue color. I could not help cry out loud, ' 'Oh, my God, it is exactly as the Sumerians had described it!" I hurried to my study, picked up a copy of The 12th Planet, and with unsteady hands looked up page 269 (in the Avon paperback edition). I read again and again the lines quoting the ancient texts. Yes, there was no doubt: though they had no telescopes, the Sumerians had described Uranus as MASH.SIG, a term which I had trans- lated "bright greenish."
A few days later came the results of the analysis of Voyager 2's data, and the Sumerian reference to water on Uranus was also corroborated. Indeed, there appeared to be water all over the place: as reported on a wrap-up program on the television series NOVA ('The Planet That Got Knocked on Its Side"), "Voyager 2 found that all the moons of Uranus are made up of rock and ordinary water ice" This abundance, or even the mere presence, of water on the supposed "gaseous" planets and their satellites at the edges of the Solar System was totally unexpected.
Yet here we had the evidence, presented in The 12th Planet, that in their texts from millennia ago the ancient Sumerians had not only known of the existence of Uranus but had ac- curately described it as greenish blue and watery!
The Host of Heaven 13
What did all that mean? It meant that in 1986 modern science did not discover what had been unknown; rather, it rediscov- ered and caught up with ancient knowledge. It was, therefore, because of that 1986 corroboration of my 1976 writings and thus of the veracity of the Sumerian texts that I felt confident enough to predict, on the eve of the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune, what it would discover there.
The Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune had thus con- firmed not only ancient knowledge regarding the very existence of these two outer planets but also crucial details regarding them. The 1989 flyby of Neptune provided still more corrob- oration of the ancient texts. In them, Neptune was listed before Uranus, as would be expected of someone who is coming into the Solar System and sees first Pluto, then Neptune, and then Uranus. In these texts or planetary lists Uranus was called Kakkab shanamma, "Planet Which Is the Double'' of Neptune.
The Voyager 2 data goes far to uphold this ancient notion. Uranus is indeed a look-alike of Neptune in size, color, and watery content; both planets are encircled by rings and orbited by a multitude of satellites, or moons. An unexpected similarity has been found regarding the two planets' magnetic fields: both have an unusually extreme inclination relative to the planets' axes of rotation—58 degrees on Uranus, 50 degrees on Nep- tune. "Neptune appears to be almost a magnetic twin of Ura- nus," John Noble Wilford reported in The New York Times. The two planets are also similar in the lengths of their days: each about sixteen to seventeen hours long.
The ferocious winds on Neptune and the water ice slurry layer on its surface attest to the great internal heat it generates, like that of Uranus. In fact, the reports from JPL state that initial temperature readings indicated that "Neptune's tem- peratures are similar to those of Uranus, which is more than a billion miles closer to the Sun." Therefore, the scientists assumed "that Neptune somehow is generating more of its internal heat than Uranus does"—somehow compensating for its greater distance from the Sun to attain the same temperatures as Uranus generates, resulting in similar temperatures on both planets—and thus adding one more feature "to the size and other characteristics that make Uranus a near twin of Neptune.''
"Planet which is the double," the Sumerians said of Uranus in comparing it to Neptune. "Size and other characteristics
14 GENESIS REVISITED
that make Uranus a near twin of Neptune," NASA's scientists announced. Not only the described characteristics but even the terminology—"planet which is the double," "a near twin of Neptune"—is similar. But one statement, the Sumerian one, was made circa 4,000 B.C., and the other, by NASA, in A D . 1989, nearly 6,000 years later. . . .
In the case of these two distant planets, it seems that modern science has only caught up with ancient knowledge. It sounds incredible, but the facts ought to speak for themselves. More- over, this is just the first of a series of scientific discoveries in the years since The 12th Planet was published that corroborate its findings in one instance after another.
Those who have read my books (The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, and The Lost Realms followed the first one) know that they are based, first and foremost, on the knowledge bequeathed to us by the Sumerians.
Theirs was the first known civilization. Appearing suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere some 6,000 years ago, it is credited with virtually all the "firsts" of a high civilization: inventions and innovations, concepts and beliefs, which form the foundation of our own Western culture and indeed of all other civilizations and cultures throughout the Earth. The wheel and animal-drawn vehicles, boats for rivers and ships for seas, the kiln and the brick, high-rise buildings, writing and schools and scribes, laws and judges and juries, kingship and citizens' councils, music and dance and art, medicine and chemistry, weaving and textiles, religion and priesthoods and temples— they all began there, in Sumer, a country in the southern part of today's Iraq, located in ancient Mesopotamia. Above all, knowledge of mathematics and astronomy began there.
Indeed, all the basic elements of modern astronomy are of Sumerian origin: the concept of a celestial sphere, of a horizon and a zenith, of the circle's division into 360 degrees, of a celestial band in which the planets orbit the Sun, of grouping stars into constellations and giving them the names and pictorial images that we call the zodiac, of applying the number 12 to this zodiac and to the divisions of time, and of devising a calendar that has been the basis of calendars to this very day. All that and much, much more began in Sumer.
The Host of Heaven 15
Figure 5
The Sumerians recorded their commercial and legal trans- actions, their tales and their histories, on clay tablets (Fig. 5a); they drew their illustrations on cylinder seals on which the depiction was carved in reverse, as a negative, that appeared as a positive when the seal was rolled on wet clay (Fig. 5b). In the ruins of Sumerian cities excavated by archaeologists in the past century and a half, hundreds, if not thousands, of the texts and illustrations that were found dealt with astronomy. Among them are lists of stars and constellations in their correct heavenly locations and manuals for observing the rising and setting of stars and planets. There are texts specifically dealing with the Solar System. There are texts among the unearthed tablets that list the planets orbiting the Sun in their correct order; one text even gives the distances between the planets. And there are illustrations on cylinder seals depicting the Solar System, as the one shown in Plate B that is at least 4,500 years old and that is now kept in the Near Eastern Section of the State Museum in East Berlin, catalogued under number V A/243.
If we sketch the illustration appearing in the upper left-hand comer of the Sumerian depiction (Fig. 6a) we see a complete Solar System in which the Sun (not Earth!) is in the center,
16 GENESIS REVISITED
Plate B
orbited by all the planets we know of today. This becomes clear when we draw these known planets around the Sun in their correct relative sizes and order (Fig. 6b). The similarity between the ancient depiction and the current one is striking; it leaves no doubt that the twinlike Uranus and Neptune were known in antiquity.
The Sumerian depiction also reveals, however, some dif- ferences. These are not artist's errors or misinformation; on the contrary, the differences—two of them—are very signif- icant.
The first difference concerns Pluto. It has a very odd orbit— too inclined to the common plane (called the Ecliptic) in which the planets orbit the Sun, and so elliptical that Pluto sometimes (as at present and until 1999) finds itself not farther but closer to the Sun than Neptune. Astronomers have therefore specu- lated, ever since its discovery in 1930, that Pluto was originally a satellite of another planet; the usual assumption is that it was a moon of Neptune that "somehow"—no one can figure out how—got torn away from its attachment to Neptune and at- tained its independent (though bizarre) orbit around the Sun.
This is confirmed by the ancient depiction, but with a sig- nificant difference. In the Sumerian depiction Pluto is shown not near Neptune but between Saturn and Uranus. And Su- merian cosmological texts, with which we shall deal at length, relate that Pluto was a satellite of Saturn that was let loose to
The Host of Heaven 17
Figure 6
eventually attain its own "destiny"—its independent orbit around the Sun.
The ancient explanation regarding the origin of Pluto reveals not just factual knowledge but also great sophistication in mat- ters celestial. It involves an understanding of the complex forces that have shaped the Solar System, as well as the de-
18 GENESIS REVISITED
velopment of astrophysical theories by which moons can be- come planets or planets in the making can fail and remain moons. Pluto, according to Sumerian cosmogony, made it; our Moon, which was in the process of becoming an independent planet, was prevented by celestial events from attaining the independent status.
Modern astronomers moved from speculation to the convic- tion that such a process has indeed occurred in our Solar System only after observations by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft determined in the past decade that Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, was a planet-in-the-making whose detachment from Saturn was not completed. The discoveries at Neptune rein- forced the opposite speculation regarding Triton, Neptune's moon that is just 400 miles smaller in diameter than Earth's Moon. Its peculiar orbit, its volcanism, and other unexpected features have suggested to the JPL scientists, in the words of the Voyager project's chief scientist Edward Stone, that "Tri- ton may have been an object sailing through the Solar System several billion years ago when it strayed too close to Neptune, came under its gravitational influence and started orbiting the planet."
How far is this hypothesis from the Sumerian notion that planetary moons could become planets, shift celestial positions, or fail to attain independent orbits? Indeed, as we continue to expound the Sumerian cosmogony, it will become evident that not only is much of modern discovery merely a rediscovery of ancient knowledge but that ancient knowledge offered expla- nations for many phenomena that modern science has yet to figure out.
Even at the outset, before the rest of the evidence in support of this statement is presented, the question inevitably arises: How on Earth could the Sumerians have known all that so long ago, at the dawn of civilization?
The answer lies in the second difference between the Su- merian depiction of the Solar System (Fig. 6a) and our present knowledge of it (Fig. 6b). It is the inclusion of a large planet in the empty space between Mars and Jupiter. We are not aware of any such planet; but the Sumerian cosmological, astronom- ical, and historical texts insist that there indeed exists one more planet in our Solar System—its twelfth member: they included
The Host of Heaven 19
the Sun, the Moon (which they counted as a celestial body in its own right for reasons stated in the texts), and ten, not nine, planets. It was the realization that a planet the Sumerian texts called NIBIRU ("Planet of the Crossing") was neither Mars nor Jupiter, as some scholars have debated, but another planet that passes between them every 3,600 years that gave rise to my first book's title, The 12th Planet—the planet which is the "twelfth member" of the Solar System (although technically it is, as a planet, only the tenth).
It was from that planet, the Sumerian texts repeatedly and persistently stated, that the ANUNNAKI came to Earth. The term literally means "Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came." They are spoken of in the Bible as the Anakim, and in Chapter 6 of Genesis are also called Nefilim, which in He- brew means the same thing: Those Who Have Come Down, from the Heavens to Earth.
And it was from the Anunnaki, the Sumerians explained— as though they had anticipated our questions—that they had learnt all they knew. The advanced knowledge we find in Sumerian texts is thus, in effect, knowledge that was possessed by the Anunnaki who had come from Nibiru; and theirs must have been a very advanced civilization, because as I have surmised from the Sumerian texts, the Anunnaki came to Earth about 445,000 years ago. Way back then they could already travel in space. Their vast elliptical orbit made a loop—this is the exact translation of the Sumerian term—around all the outer planets, acting as a moving observatory from which the Anunnaki could investigate all those planets. No wonder that what we are discovering now was already known in Sumerian times.
Why anyone would bother to come to this speck of matter we call Earth, not by accident, not by chance, not once but repeatedly, every 3,600 years, is a question the Sumerian texts have answered. On their planet Nibiru, the Anunnaki/Nefilim were facing a situation we on Earth may also soon face: eco- logical deterioration was making life increasingly impossible. There was a need to protect their dwindling atmosphere, and the only solution seemed to be to suspend gold particles above it, as a shield. (Windows on American spacecraft, for example, are coated with a thin layer of gold to shield the astronauts
20 GENESIS REVISITED
from radiation). This rare metal had been discovered by the Anunnaki on what they called the Seventh Planet (counting from the outside inward), and they launched Mission Earth to obtain it. At first they tried to obtain it effortlessly, from the waters of the Persian Gulf; but when that failed, they embarked on toilsome mining operations in southeastern Africa.
Some 300,000 years ago, the Anunnaki assigned to the Af- rican mines mutinied. It was then that the chief scientist and the chief medical officer of the Anunnaki used genetic manip- ulation and in-vitro fertilization techniques to create "primitive workers"—the first Homo sapiens to take over the backbreak- ing toil in the gold mines.
The Sumerian texts that describe all these events and their condensed version in the Book of Genesis have been exten- sively dealt with in The 12th Planet. The scientific aspects of those developments and of the techniques employed by the Anunnaki are the subject of this book. Modern science, it will be shown, is blazing an amazing track of scientific advances— but the road to the future is replete with signposts, knowledge, and advances from the past. The Anunnaki, it will be shown, have been there before; and as the relationship between them and the beings they had created changed, as they decided to give Mankind civilization, they imparted to us some of their knowledge and the ability to make our own scientific advances.
Among the scientific advances that will be discussed in the ensuing chapters will also be the mounting evidence for the existence of Nibiru. If it were not for The 12th Planet, the discovery of Nibiru would be a great event in astronomy but no more significant for our daily lives than, say, the discovery in 1930 of Pluto. It was nice to learn that the Solar System has one more planet "out there," and it would be equally gratifying to confirm that the planetary count is not nine but ten; that would especially please astrologers, who need twelve celestial bodies and not just eleven for the twelve houses of the zodiac.
But after the publication of The 12th Planet and the evidence therein—which has not been refuted since its first printing in 1976—and the evidence provided by scientific advances since then, the discovery of Nibiru cannot remain just a matter in- volving textbooks on astronomy. If what I have written is so--
The Host of Heaven 21
if, in other words, the Sumerians were correct in what they were recording—the discovery of Nibiru would mean not only that there is one more planet out there but that there is Life out there. Moreover, it would confirm that there are intelligent beings out there—people who were so advanced that, almost half a million years ago, they could travel in space; people who were coming and going between their planet and Earth every 3,600 years.
It is who is out there on Nibiru, and not just its existence, that is bound to shake existing political, religious, social, eco- nomic, and military orders on Earth. What will the repercus- sions be when—not if—Nibiru is found?
It is a question, believe it or not, that is already being pon- dered.
22
GENESIS REVISITED
GOLD MINING—HOW LONG AGO?
Is there evidence that mining took place, in southern Africa, during the Old Stone Age? Archaeological studies indicate that it indeed was so.
Realizing that sites of abandoned ancient mines may in- dicate where gold could be found, South Africa's leading mining corporation, the Anglo-American Corporation, in the 1970s engaged archaeologists to look for such ancient mines. Published reports (in the corporation's journal Op- tima) detail the discovery in Swaziland and other sites in South Africa of extensive mining areas with shafts to depths of fifty feet. Stone objects and charcoal remains established dates of 35,000, 46,000, and 60,000 B.C. for these sites. The archaeologists and anthropologists who joined in dating the finds believed that mining technology was used in south- ern Africa "during much of the period subsequent to 100,000 B.C."
In September 1988, a team of international physicists came to South Africa to verify the age of human habitats in Swaziland and Zululand. The most modern techniques indicated an age of 80,000 to 115,000 years.
Regarding the most ancient gold mines of Monotapa in southern Zimbabwe, Zulu legends hold that they were worked by "artificially produced flesh and blood slaves created by the First People." These slaves, the Zulu legends recount, "went into battle with the Ape-Man" when "the great war star appeared in the sky" (see Indaba My Chil- dren, by the Zulu medicine man Credo Vusamazulu Mu- twa).
2
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
"It was Voyager [project] that focused our attention on the importance of collisions," acknowledged Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the chief scientist of the Voyager program. "The cosmic crashes were potent sculptors of the Solar System."
The Sumerians made clear, 6,000 years earlier, the very same fact. Central to their cosmogony, world view, and religion was a cataclysmic event that they called the Celestial Battle. It was an event to which references were made in miscellaneous Sumerian texts, hymns, and proverbs—just as we find in the Bible's books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and various others. But the Sumerians also described the event in detail, step by step, in a long text that required seven tablets. Of its Sumerian original only fragments and quotations have been found; the mostly complete text has reached us in the Akkadian language, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians who followed the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. The text deals with the for- mation of the Solar System prior to the Celestial Battle and even more so with the nature, causes, and results of that awe- some collision. And, with a single cosmogonic premise, it explains puzzles that still baffle our astronomers and astro- physicists.
Even more important, whenever these modern scientists have come upon a satisfactory answer—it fits and corroborates the Sumerian one!
Until the Voyager discoveries, the prevailing scientific view- point considered the Solar System as we see it today as the way it had taken shape soon after its beginning, formed by immutable laws of celestial motion and the force of gravity. There have been oddballs, to be sure—meteorites that come from somewhere and collide with the stable members of the
23
24 GENESIS REVISITED
Solar System, pockmarking them with craters, and comets that zoom about in greatly elongated orbits, appearing from some- where and disappearing, it seems, to nowhere. But these ex- amples of cosmic debris, it has been assumed, go back to the very beginning of the Solar System, some 4.5 billion years ago, and are pieces of planetary matter that failed to be in- corporated into the planets or their moons and rings. A little more baffling has been the asteroid belt, a band of rocks that forms an orbiting chain between Mars and Jupiter. According to Bode's law, an empirical rule that explains why the planets formed where they did, there should have been a planet, at least twice the size of Earth, between Mars and Jupiter. Is the orbiting debris of the asteroid belt the remains of such a planet? The affirmative answer is plagued by two problems: the total amount of matter in the asteroid belt does not add up to the mass of such a planet, and there is no plausible explanation for what might have caused the breakup of such a hypothetical
Figure 7
It Came from Outer Space 25
planet; if a celestial collision—when, with what, and why? The scientists had no answer.
The realization that there had to be one or more major col- lisions that changed the Solar System from its initial form became inescapable after the Uranus flyby in 1986, as Dr. Stone has admitted. That Uranus was lilted on its side was already known from telescopic and other instrumental obser- vations even before the Voyager encounter. But was it formed that way from the very beginning, or did some external force— a forceful collision or encounter with another major celestial body—bring about the tilting?
The answer had to be provided by the closeup examination of the moons of Uranus by Voyager 2. The fact that these moons swirl around the equator of Uranus in its tilted posi- tion—forming, all together, a kind of bull's-eye facing the Sun (Fig. 7)—made scientists wonder whether these moons were there at the time of the tilting event, or whether they formed after the event, perhaps from matter thrown out by the force of the collision that tilted Uranus.
The theoretical basis for the answer was enunciated, prior to the encounter with Uranus, among others by Dr. Christian Veillet of the French Centre d'Etudes et des Recherches Geo- dynamiques. If the moons formed at the same time as Uranus, the celestial "raw material" from which they agglomerated should have condensed the heavier matter nearer the planet; there should be more of heavier, rocky material and thinner ice coats on the inner moons and a lighter combination of materials (more water ice, less rocks) on the outer moons. By the same principle of the distribution of material in the Solar System—a larger proportion of heavier matter nearer the Sun, more of the lighter matter (in a "gaseous" state) farther out— the moons of the more distant Uranus should be proportionately lighter than those of the nearer Saturn.
But the findings revealed a situation contrary to these ex- pectations. In the comprehensive summary reports on the Ura- nus encounter, published in Science, July 4, 1986, a team of forty scientists concluded that the densities of the Uranus moons (except for that of the moon Miranda)' 'are significantly heavier than those of the icy satellites of Saturn." Likewise, the Voyager 2 data showed—again contrary to what "should
26 GENESIS REVISITED
have been"—that the two larger inner moons of Uranus, Ariel and Umbriel, are lighter in composition (thick, icy layers; small, rocky cores) than the outer moons Titania and Oberon, which were discovered to be made mostly of heavy rocky material and had only thin coats of ice.
These findings by Voyager 2 were not the only clues sug- gesting that the moons of Uranus were not formed at the same time as the planet itself but rather some lime later, in unusual circumstances. Another discovery that puzzled the scientists was that the rings of Uranus were pitch-black, "blacker than coal dust," presumably composed of "carbon-rich material, a sort of primordial tar scavenged from outer space" (the em- phasis is mine). These dark rings, warped, tilted, and "bi- zarrely elliptical," were quite unlike the symmetrical bracelets of icy particles circling Saturn. Pitch-black also were six of the new moonlets discovered at Uranus, some acting as "shep- herds" for the rings. The obvious conclusion was that the rings and moonlets were formed from the debris of a "violent event in Uranus's past." Assistant project scientist at JPL Ellis Miner stated it in simpler words: "A likely possibility is that an interloper from outside the Uranus system came in and struck a once larger moon sufficiently hard to have fractured it."
The theory of a catastrophic celestial collision as the event that could explain all the odd phenomena on Uranus and its moons and rings was further strengthened by the discovery that the boulder-size black debris that forms the Uranus rings circles the planet once every eight hours—a speed that is twice the speed of the planet's own revolution around its axis. This raises the question, how was this much-higher speed imparted to the debris in the rings?
Based on all the preceding data, the probability of a celestial collision emerged as the only plausible answer. "We must take into account the strong possibility that satellite formation con- ditions were affected by the event that created Uranus's large obliquity," the forty-strong team of scientists stated. In simpler words, it means that in all probability the moons in question were created as a result of the collision that knocked Uranus on its side. In press conferences the NASA scientists were more audacious. "A collision with something the size of Earth, traveling at about 40,000 miles per hour, could have done it,"
II Came from Outer Space 27
they said, speculating that it probably happened about four billion years ago.
Astronomer Garry Hunt of the Imperial College, London, summed it up in seven words: "Uranus took an almighty bang early on."
But neither in the verbal briefings nor in the long written reports was an attempt made to suggest what the "something" was, where it had come from, and how it happened to collide with, or bang into, Uranus.
For those answers, we will have to go back to the Sumer- ians... .
Before we turn from knowledge acquired in the late 1970s and 1980s to what was known 6,000 years earlier, one more aspect of the puzzle should be looked into: Are the oddities at Neptune the result of collisions, or ' 'bangs,'' unrelated to those of Uranus—or were they all the result of a single catastrophic event that affected all the outer planets?
Before the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune, the planet was known to have only two satellites, Nereid and Triton. Nereid was found to have a peculiar orbit: it was unusually tilted compared with the planet's equatorial plane (as much as 28 degrees) and was very eccentric—orbiting the planet not in a near-circular path but in a very elongated one, which takes the moon as far as six million miles from Neptune and as close as one million miles to the planet. Nereid, although of a size that by planetary-formation rules should be spherical, has an odd shape like that of a twisted doughnut. It also is bright on one side and pitch-black on the other. All these peculiarities have led Martha W. Schaefer and Bradley E. Schaefer, in a major study on the subject published in Nature magazine (June 2, 1987) to conclude that "Nereid accreted into a moon around Neptune or another planet and that both it and Triton were knocked into their peculiar orbits by some large body or planet." "Imagine," Brad Schaefer noted, "that at one time Neptune had an ordinary satellite system like that of Jupiter or Saturn; then some massive body comes into the system and perturbs things a lot."
The dark material that shows up on one side of Nereid could be explained in one of two ways—but both require a collision
28 GENESIS REVISITED
in the scenario. Either an impact on one side of the satellite swept off an existing darker layer there, uncovering lighter material below the surface, or the dark matter belonged to the impacting body and "went splat on one side of Nereid." That the latter possibility is the more plausible is suggested by the discovery, announced by the JPL team on August 29, 1989, that all the new satellites (six more) found by Voyager 2 at Neptune "are very dark" and "all have irregular shapes," even the moon designated 1989N1, whose size normally would have made it spherical.
The theories regarding Triton and its elongated and retro- grade (clockwise) orbit around Neptune also call for a collision event.
Writing in the highly prestigious magazine Science on the eve of the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune, a team of Caltech scientists (P. Goldberg, N. Murray. P. Y. Longaretti, and D. Banfield) postulated that "Triton was captured from a heli- ocentric orbit"—from an orbit around the Sun—"as a result of a collision with what was then one of Neptune's regular satellites." In this scenario the original small Neptune satellite "would have been devoured by Triton," but the force of the collision would have been such that it dissipated enough of Triton's orbital energy to slow it down and be captured by Neptune's gravity. Another theory, according to which Triton was an original satellite of Neptune, was shown by this study to be faulty and unable to withstand critical analysis.
The data collected by Voyager 2 from the actual flyby of Triton supported this theoretical conclusion. It also was in accord with other studies (as by David Stevenson of Caltech) that showed that Triton's internal heat and surface features could be explained only in terms of a collision in which Triton was captured into orbit around Neptune.
"Where did these impacting bodies come from?" rhetori- cally asked Gene Shoemaker, one of NASA's scientists, on the NOVA television program. But the question was left with- out an answer. Unanswered too was the question of whether the cataclysms at Uranus and Neptune were aspects of a single event or were unconnected incidents.
It is not ironic but gratifying to find that the answers to all these puzzles were provided by the ancient Sumerian texts.
It Came from Outer Space 29
and that all the data discovered or confirmed by the Voyager flights uphold and corroborate the Sumerian information and my presentation and interpretation thereof in The 12th Planet. The Sumerian texts speak of a single but comprehensive event. Their texts explain more than what modern astronomers have been trying to explain regarding the outer planets. The ancient texts also explain matters closer to home, such as the origin of the Earth and its Moon, of the Asteroid Belt and the comets. The texts then go on to relate a tale that combines the credo of the Creationists with the theory of Evolution, a tale that offers a more successful explanation than either mod- ern conception of what happened on Earth and how Man and his civilization came about.
It all began, the Sumerian texts relate, when the Solar System was still young. The Sun (APSU in the Sumerian texts, mean- ing "One Who Exists from the Beginning"), its little com- panion MUM. MU ('' One Who Was Born,'' our Mercury) and farther away TI.AMAT ("Maiden of Life") were the first members of the Solar System; it gradually expanded by the "birth" of three planetary pairs, the planets we call Venus and Mars between Mummu and Tiamat, the giant pair Jupiter and Saturn (to use their modern names) beyond Tiamat, and Uranus and Neptune farther out (Fig. 8).
Into this original Solar System, still unstable soon after its formation (I estimated the time about four billion years ago), an Invader appeared. The Sumerians called it NIBIRU; the Babylonians renamed it Marduk in honor of their national god. It appeared from outer space, from "the Deep," in the words of the ancient text. But as it approached the outer planets of our Solar System, it began to be drawn into it. As expected, the first outer planet to attract Nibiru with its gravitational pull was Neptune—E.A ("He Whose House Is Water") in Su- merian. "He who begot him was Ea," the ancient text ex- plained.
Nibiru/Marduk itself was a sight to behold; alluring, spar- kling, lofty, lordly are some of the adjectives used to describe it. Sparks and flashes bolted from it to Neptune and Uranus as it passed near them. It might have arrived with its own satellites already orbiting it, or it might have acquired some as a result
30 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 8
of the gravitational pull of the outer planets. The ancient text speaks of its "perfect members. . .difficult to perceive"— "four were his eyes, four were his ears."
As it passed near Ea/Neptune, Nibiru/Marduk's side be- gan to bulge "as though he had a second head." Was it then that the bulge was torn away to become Neptune's moon Tri- ton? One aspect thai speaks strongly for this is the fact that Nibiru/Marduk entered the Solar System in a retrograde (clock- wise) orbit, counter to that of the other planets (Fig. 9). Only
It Came from Outer Space 31
Figure 9
this Sumerian detail, according to which the invading planet was moving counter to the orbital motion of all the other planets, can explain the retrograde motion of Triton, the highly elliptical orbits of other satellites and comets, and the other major events that we have yet to tackle.
More satellites were created as Nibiru/Marduk passed by Anu/Uranus. Describing this passing of Uranus, the text states that "Anu brought forth and begot the four winds"—as clear a reference as one could hope for to the four major moons of Uranus that were formed, we now know, only during the col- lision that tilted Uranus. At the same time we learn from a later passage in the ancient text that Nibiru/Marduk himself gained three satellites as a result of this encounter.
Although the Sumerian texts describe how, after its eventual capture into solar orbit, Nibiru/Marduk revisited the outer planets and eventually shaped them into the system as we know it today, the very first encounter already explains the various puzzles that modern astronomy faced or still faces regarding Neptune, Uranus, their moons, and their rings.
Past Neptune and Uranus, Nibiru/Marduk was drawn even more into the midst of the planetary system as it reached the immense gravitational pulls of Saturn (AN.SHAR, "Foremost of the Heavens") and Jupiter (KI.SHAR, "Foremost of the Firm Lands"). As Nibiru/Marduk "approached and stood as
32 GENESIS REVISITED
though in combat" near Anshar/Saturn, the two planets "kissed their lips." It was then that the "destiny," the orbital path, of Nibiru/Marduk was changed forever. It was also then that the chief satellite of Saturn, GA.GA (the eventual Pluto), was pulled away in the direction of Mars and Venus—a di- rection possible only by the retrograde force of Nibiru/Marduk. Making a vast elliptical orbit, Gaga eventually returned to the outermost reaches of the Solar System. There it "addressed" Neptune and Uranus as it passed their orbits on the swing back. It was the beginning of the process by which Gaga was to become our Pluto, with its inclined and peculiar orbit that sometimes takes it between Neptune and Uranus.
The new "destiny," or orbital path, of Nibiru/Marduk was now irrevocably set toward the olden planet Tiamat. At that time, relatively early in the formation of the Solar System, it was marked by instability, especially (we learn from the text) in the region of Tiamat. While other planets nearby were still wobbling in their orbits, Tiamat was pulled in many directions by the two giants beyond her and the two smaller planets between her and the Sun. One result was the tearing off her, or the gathering around her, of a "host" of satellites "furious with rage," in the poetic language of the text (named by schol- ars the Epic of Creation). These satellites, "roaring monsters," were "clothed with terror" and "crowned with halos," swirl- ing furiously about and orbiting as though they were "celestial gods"—planets.
Most dangerous to the stability or safety of the other planets was Tiamat's "leader of the host," a large satellite that grew to almost planetary size and was about to attain its independent "destiny"—its own orbit around the Sun. Tiamat "cast a spell for him, to sit among the celestial gods she exalted him." It was called in Sumerian KIN.GU—"Great Emissary."
Now the text raised the curtain on the unfolding drama; I have recounted it, step by step, in The 12th Planet. As in a Greek tragedy, the ensuing "celestial battle" was unavoidable as gravitational and magnetic forces came inexorably into play, leading to the collision between the oncoming Nibiru/Marduk with its seven satellites ("winds" in the ancient text) and Tiamat and its "host" of eleven satellites headed by Kingu.
Although they were headed on a collision course, Tiamat orbiting counterclockwise and Nibiru/Marduk clockwise, the
It Came from Outer Space 33
Figure 10
two planets did not collide—a fact of cardinal astronomical importance. It was the satellites, or "winds," (literal Sumerian meaning: "Those that are by the side") of Nibiru/Marduk that smashed into Tiatnat and collided with her satellites.
In the first such encounter (Fig. 10), the first phase of the Celestial Battle,
The four winds he stationed
that nothing of her could escape:
The South Wind, the North Wind,
the East Wind, the West Wind.
Close to his side he held the net,
the gift of his grandfather Anu who brought forth the Evil Wind, the Whirlwind and the Hurricane. . . .
34 GENESIS REVISITED
He sent forth the winds which he had created, the seven of them; to trouble Tiamat within they rose up behind him.
These "winds," or satellites, of Nibiru/Marduk, "the seven of them," were the principal "weapons" with which Tiamat was attacked in the first phase of the Celestial Battle (Fig. 10). But the invading planet had other "weapons" too:
In front of him he set the lightning,
with a blazing flame he filled his body;
He then made a net to enfold Tiamat therein. . . .
A fearsome halo his head was turbaned.
He was wrapped with awesome terror as with a cloak.
As the two planets and their hosts of satellites came close enough for Nibiru/Marduk to "scan the inside of Tiamat" and ' 'perceive the scheme of Kingu,'' Nibiru/ Marduk attacked Tia- mat with his "net" (magnetic field?) to "enfold her," shooting at the old planet immense bolts of electricity ("divine light- nings"). Tiamat "was filled with brilliance"—slowing down, heating up, "becoming distended." Wide gaps opened in its crust, perhaps emitting steam and volcanic matter. Into one widening fissure Nibiru/Marduk thrust one of its main satel- lites, the one called "Evil Wind." It tore Tiamat's "belly, cut through her insides, splitting her heart."
Besides splitting up Tiamat and "extinguishing her life," the first encounter sealed the fate of the moonlets orbiting her— all except the planetlike Kingu. Caught in the "net"—the magnetic and gravitational pull—of Nibiru/Marduk, "shat- tered, broken up," the members of the "band of Tiamat" were thrown off their previous course and forced into new orbital paths in the opposite direction: "Trembling with fear, they turned their backs about."
Thus were the comets created—thus, we learn from a 6,000- year-old text, did the comets obtain their greatly elliptical and retrograde orbits. As to Kingu, Tiamat's principal satellite, the text informs us that in that first phase of the celestial collision Kingu was just deprived of its almost-independent orbit. Nibiru/Marduk took away from him his "destiny." Ni- biru/Marduk made Kingu into a DUG.GA.E, "a mass of life-
It Came from Outer Space 35
less clay," devoid of atmosphere, waters and radioactive matter and shrunken in size; and "with fetters bound him," to remain in orbit around the battered Tiamal.
Having vanquished Tiamat, Nibiru/Marduk sailed on on his new "destiny." The Sumerian text leaves no doubt that the erstwhile invader orbited the Sun:
He crossed the heavens and surveyed the regions, and Apsu's quarter he measured;
The Lord the dimensions of the Apsu measured.
Having circled the Sun (Apsu), Nibiru/Marduk continued into distant space. But now, caught forever in solar orbit, it had to turn back. On his return round, Ea/Neptune was there to greet him and Anshar/Saturn hailed his victory. Then his new orbital path returned him to the scene of the Celestial Battle, "turned back to Tiamat whom he had bound."
The Lord paused to view her lifeless body. To divide the monster he then artfully planned. Then, as a mussel, he split her into two parts.
With this act the creation of "the heaven" reached its final stage, and the creation of Earth and its Moon began. First the new impacts broke Tiamat into two halves. The upper part, her "skull," was struck by the Nibiru/Marduk satellite called North Wind; the blow carried it, and with it Kingu, "to places that have been unknown"—to a brand-new orbit where there had not been a planet before. The Earth and our Moon were created (Fig. 11)!
The other half of Tiamat was smashed by the impacts into bits and pieces. This lower half, her "tail," was "hammered together" to become a "bracelet" in the heavens:
Locking the pieces together,
as watchmen he stationed them. . . .
He bent Tiamat's tail to form the Great Band as a bracelet.
Thus was "the Great Band," the Asteroid Belt, created. Having disposed of Tiamat and Kingu, Nibiru/Marduk once
36 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure II
again "crossed the heavens and surveyed the regions." This time his attention was focused on the "Dwelling of Ea" (Nep- tune), giving that planet and its twinlike Uranus their final makeup. Nibiru/Marduk also, according to the ancient text, provided Gaga/Pluto with its final "destiny," assigning to it "a hidden place"—a hitherto unknown part of the heavens. It was farther out than Neptune's location; it was, we are told, "in the Deep"—far out in space. In line with its new position as the outermost planet, it was granted a new name: US.MI— "He Who Shows the Way," the first planet encountered com- ing into the Solar System—that is, from outer space toward the Sun.
Thus was Pluto created and put into the orbit it now holds. Having thus "constructed the stations" for the planets, Ni-
It Came from Outer Space 37
Figure 12
Figure 13
38 GENESIS REVISITED
biru/Marduk made two "abodes" for itself. One was in the "Firmament," as the asteroid belt was also called in the ancient texts; the other far out "in the Deep" was called the "Great/Distant Abode," alias E.SHARRA ("Abode/Home of the Ruler/Prince"). Modern astronomers call these two pla- netary positions the perigee (the orbital point nearest the Sun) and the apogee (the farthest one) (Fig. 12). It is an orbit, as concluded from the evidence amassed in The 12th Planet, that takes 3,600 Earth-years to complete.
Thus did the Invader that came from outer space become the twelfth member of the Solar System, a system made up of the Sun in the center, with its longtime companion Mercury; the three olden pairs (Venus and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune); the Earth and the Moon, the remains of the great Tiamat, though in a new position; the newly inde- pendent Pluto; and the planet that put it all into final shape, Nibiru/Marduk (Fig. 13).
Modern astronomy and recent discoveries uphold and cor- roborate this millennia-old tale.
It Came from Outer Space 39
WHEN EARTH HAD NOT BEEN FORMED
In 1766 J. D. Titius proposed and in 1772 Johann Elert Bode popularized what became known as "Bode's law," which showed that planetary distances follow, more or less, the pro- gression 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc., if the formula is manipulated by multiplying by 3, adding 4, and dividing by 10. Using as a measure the astronomical unit (AU), which is the distance of Earth from the Sun, the formula indicates that there should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter (the asteroids are found there) and a planet beyond Saturn (Uranus was discovered). The formula shows tolerable deviations up until one reaches Uranus but gets out of whack from Neptune on.
Planet Distance
Mercury 0.387 Venus 0.723 Earth 1.000 Mars 1.524 Asteroids 2.794 Jupiter 5.203 Saturn 9.539 Uranus 19.182 Neptune 30.058 Pluto 39.400
Bode 's Law Distance Deviation
0.400 3.4% 0.700 3.2% 1.000
1.600 5.0% 2.800
5.200
Mercury Venus Earth Mars Asteroids Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto
0.387 0.723 1.000 1.524 2.794 5.203 9.539 19.182 30.058 39.400
0.400 3.4% 0.700 3.2% 1.000
1.600 5.0% 2.800
5.200
10.000 4.8% 19.600 2.1% 38.800 36.3% 77.200 95.9%
(AU)
Planet
Distance ______ (AU)
10.000 4.8% 19.600 2.1% 38.800 36.3% 77.200 95.9%
Bode's Law Distance Deviation
Bode's law, which was arrived at empirically, thus uses Earth as its arithmetic starting point. But according to the Sumerian cosmogony, at the beginning there was Tiamat between Mars and Jupiter, whereas Earth had not yet formed.
Dr. Amnon Sitchin has pointed out that if Bode's law is stripped of its arithmetical devices and only the geometric progression is retained, the formula works just as well if Earth is omitted—thus confirming Sumerian cosmogony:
Planet Distance from Ratio of _____ ______________ Sun (miles) Increase
36,250,000 — 67,200,000 1.85 141,700,000 2.10
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Asteroids (Ti.Amat)260,400,000 1.84
Jupiter Saturn Uranus
484,000,000 1.86
887,100,000 1.83 1.783,900,000 2.01
3
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 as 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 cal- culated 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 chro- nology 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 Crea- tionists and Evolutionists—a totally unwarranted demarcation, as the evidence herewith presented will show—are undoubt- edly more sharply etched by the principle of the separation between religion and state that is embodied in the U.S. Con- stitution. But such a separation is not the norm among the
40
In the Beginning 41
Earth's nations (even in enlightened democracies such as En- gland), 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 religion and a national god, the temples were the seat of scientific knowledge, and the priests were the savants. This was so because when civilization began, the gods who were worshipped—the focus of the act of being "reli- gious"—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 coun- terpart. By renaming Nibiru "Marduk" in the Babylonian ver- sions of the creation story, the Babylonians usurped for Marduk the attributes of a supreme "God of Heaven and Earth." This version—the most intact one found so far—is known as Enuma elish ("When in the heights"), taken from its opening words. It became the most hallowed religious-political-scientific document of the land; it was read as a central part of the New Year rituals, and players reenacted the tale in passion plays to bring its import home to the masses. The clay tablets (Fig. 14) on which they were written were prized possessions of temples and royal libraries in antiquity.
The decipherment of the writing on the clay tablets discov- ered 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 com- piled. Especially important were texts found in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (a city of biblical renown); they recorded a tale of creation that matches, in some parts word for word, the tale of Genesis. George Smith of the British Museum pieced together the broken tablets that held the creation texts and published, in 1876, The Chaldean Gen- esis, it conclusively established that there indeed existed an Akkadian text of the Genesis tale, written in the Old Babylonian dialect, that preceded the biblical text by at least a thousand years. Excavations between 1902 and 1914 uncovered tablets
42 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 14
with the Assyrian version of the creation epic, in which the name of Ashur, the Assyrian national god, was substituted for that of the Babylonian Marduk. Subsequent discoveries estab- lished not only the extent of the copying and translation, in antiquity, of this epic text, but also its unmistakable Sumerian origin.
It was L. W. King who, in 1902, in his work The Seven Tablets of Creation, showed that the various fragments add up to seven tablets; six of them relate the creation process; the seventh tablet is entirely devoted to the exaltation of "the Lord" — Marduk in the Babylonian version, Ashur in the As-
In the Beginning 43
syrian one. One can only guess that this seven-tablet division somehow is the basis of the division of the biblical story into a seven-part timetable, of which six parts involve divine han- diwork and the seventh is devoted to a restful and satisfactory look back at what had been achieved.
It is true that the Book of Genesis, written in Hebrew, uses the term yom, commonly meaning and translated as "day," to denote each phase. Once, as a guest on a radio talk show in a "Bible Belt" city, I was challenged by a woman who called in about this very point. I explained that by "day" the Bible does not mean our term of twenty-four hours on Earth but rather conveys the concept of a phase in the process of creation. No, she insisted, that is exactly what the Bible means: twenty-four hours. I then pointed out to her that the text of the first chapter of Genesis deals not with a human timetable but with that of the Creator, and we are told in the Book of Psalms (90:4) that in God's eyes "a thousand years are like yester- day." Would she concede, at least, that Creation might have taken six thousand years? I asked. To my disappointment, there was no concession. Six days means six days, she insisted.
Is the biblical tale of creation a religious document, its con- tents 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 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 Su- merian 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, resplendent in his precious garments (Fig. 15), he was wor- shipped as Ilu (translated "god" but literally meaning "the Lofty One"); his struggle to gain supremacy over the other Anunnaki gods has been detailed in my book The Wars of Gods and Men. On the other hand, "Marduk" was a celestial deity.
44 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 15
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 sym- bolic depiction was that of a winged disc (Fig. 16). The As- syrians, replacing Marduk with their national god Ashur, combined the two aspects and depicted Ashur as a god within the winged disc (Fig. 17).
The Hebrews followed suit but, preaching monotheism and recognizing—based on Sumerian scientific knowledge—the universality of God, ingeniously solved the problem of duality and of the multitude of Anunnaki deities involved in the events on Earth by concocting a singular-but-plural entity, not an El (the Hebrew equivalent of Ilu) but Elohim—a Creator who is plural (literally "Gods") and yet One. This departure from the Babylonian and Assyrian religious viewpoint can be explained only by a realization that the Hebrews 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, ev-
In the Beginning 45
46 GENESIS REVISITED
crlasting, and omnipresent God—Elohim—-in whose grand de- sign for the universe the path of 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.
These profound perceptions, which lie at the core of the biblical adoption of the creation story, Enuma elish, could be arrived at only by bringing together religion and science while retaining, in the narrative and sequence of events, the scientific basis.
But to recognize this—that Genesis represents not just re- ligion but also science—one must recognize the role of the Anunnaki and accept that the Sumerian texts are not "myth" but factual reports. Scholars have made much progress in this respect, but they have not yet arrived at a total recognition of the factual nature of the texts. Although both scientists and theologians are by now well aware of the Mesopotamian origin of Genesis, they remain stubborn in brushing off the scientific value of these ancient texts. It cannot be science, they hold, because "it should be obvious by the nature of things that none of these stories can possibly be the product of human memory'' (to quote N. M. Sama of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Understanding Genesis). Such a statement can be challenged only by explaining, as I have repeatedly done in my writings, that the information of 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"1 how the Solar System was created or how Nibiru/Marduk invaded the Solar System, be- cause they themselves were not yet 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 cre- ation; 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."
In the Beginning 47
Several updated studies of the Enumu elish, such as The Babylonian Genesis by Alexander Heidel of the Oriental In- stitute, University of Chicago, have dwelt on the parallels in theme and structure between the Mesopotamian and biblical narratives. Both indeed begin with the statement that the tale takes its reader (or listener, as in Babylon) to the primordial time when the Earth and "the heavens" did not yet exist. But whereas the Sumerian cosmogony dealt with the creation of the Solar System and only then set the stage for the appearance of the celestial Lord (Nibiru/Marduk), the biblical version skipped all that and went directly to the Celestial Battle and its aftermath.
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 the traditional King James version, the biblical open- ing is more matter-of-fact, not an inspirational religious opus but a lesson in primordial science, informing the reader that there indeed was a time when Heaven and the Earth did not yet exist, and that it took an act of the Celestial Lord, his "spirit" moving upon the "waters." to bring Heaven and Earth about with a bolt of light.
The progress in biblical and linguistic studies since the time of King James has moved the editors of both the Catholic The New American Bible and The New English Bible of the churches in Great Britain to substitute the word "wind"—which is what the Hebrew ru'ach means—for the "Spirit of God," so that the last verse now reads "a mighty wind swept over the waters." They retain, however, the concept of "abyss" for the Hebrew word Tehom in the original Bible; but by now even theologians acknowledge that the reference is to no other entity than the Sumerian Tiamat.
48 GENESIS REVISITED
With this understanding, the reference in the Mesopotamian version to the mingling "waters" of Tiamat ceases to be al- legorical and calls for a factual evaluation. It goes to the ques- tion of the plentiful waters of Earth and the biblical assertion (correct, as we shall soon 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 watery!
The watery nature of Tehom/Tiamat is mentioned in various biblical references. The prophet Isaiah (51:10) recalled "the primeval days" when the might of the Lord "carved the Haughty One, made spin the watery monster, drained off the waters of the mighty Tehom." The psalmist extolled the Lord of Beginnings who "by thy might the waters thou didst disperse, the leader of the watery monsters thou didst break up."
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 flashes 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.
The continuing narrative of Genesis does not describe the ensuing splitting up of Tiamat or the breakup of her host of satellites, described so vividly in the Mesopotamian texts. It is evident, however, from the above-quoted verses from Isaiah and Psalms, as well as from the narrative in Job (26:7-13), that the Hebrews were familiar with the skipped-over portions of the original tale. Job recalled how the celestial Lord smote "the helpers of the Haughty One," and he exalted the Lord
In the Beginning 49
who, having come from the outer reaches of space, cleaved Tiamat (Tehom) and changed the Solar System:
The hammered canopy He stretched out in the place of Tehom,
The Earth suspended in the void;
He penned waters in its denseness, without any cloud bursting. . . .
His powers the waters did arrest,
His energy the Haughty One did cleave.
His wind the Hammered Bracelet measured out, His hand the twisting dragon did extinguish.
The Mesopotamian texts continued from here to describe how Nibiru/Marduk formed the asteroid belt out of Tiamat's lower half:
The other half of her
he set up as a screen for the skies; Locking them together
as watchmen he stationed them. . . . He bent Tiamat's tail
to form the Great Band as a bracelet.
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."
Realizing that the Hebrew word Shama'im is used to speak of Heaven or the heavens in general, the editors of Genesis went into some length to use two terms for "the Heaven" created as a result of the destruction of Tiamat. What separated
50 GENESIS REVISITED
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 then 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.
The ancient tale is replete with details, each of which is amazing by itself. Ancient awareness of them is so incredible that its only plausible explanation is the one offered by the Sumerians themselves—namely, that those who had come to Earth from Nibiru were the source of that knowledge. Modern astronomy has already corroborated many of these details; by doing so, it indirectly confirms the key assertions of the ancient cosmogony and astronomy: the Celestial Battle that resulted in the breakup of Tiamat, the creation of Earth and the asteroid belt, and the capture of Nibiru/Marduk into permanent orbit around our Sun.
Let us look at one aspect of the ancient tale—the "host" of satellites, or "winds," that the "celestial gods" had.
We now know that Mars has two moons, Jupiter sixteen moons and several more moonlets, Saturn twenty-one or more, Uranus as many as fifteen, Neptune eight. Until Galileo dis- covered with his telescope the four brightest and largest sat- ellites of Jupiter in 1610, it was unthinkable that a celestial body could have more than one such companion-—evidence Earth and its solitary Moon.
But here we read in the Sumerian texts that as Ni- biru/Marduk's gravity interacted with that of Uranus, the In- vader "begot" three satellites ("winds") and Anu/Uranus "brought forth" four such moons. By the time Nibiru/Marduk reached Tiamat, it had a total of seven "winds" with which to attack Tiamat, and Tiamat had a "host'' of eleven—among
In the Beginning 51
them the "leader of the host," which was about to become an independently orbiting planet, our eventual Moon.
Another element of the Sumerian tale, of great significance to the ancient astronomers, was the assertion that the debris from the lower half of Tiamat was stretched out in the space where she had once existed.
The Mesopotamian texts, and the biblical version thereof in Genesis, are emphatic and detailed about the formation of the asteroid belt—insisting that such a "bracelet" of debris exists and orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. But our astron- omers were not aware of that until the nineteenth century. The first realization that the space between Mars and Jupiter was not just a dark void was the discovery by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1, 1801, of a small celestial object in the space between the two planets, an object that was named Ceres and that has the distinction of being the first known (and named) asteroid. Three more asteroids (Pallas, Juno, and Vesta) were discovered by 1807, none after that until 1845, and hundreds since then, so that almost 2,000 are known by now. Astronomers believe that there may be as many as 50,000 asteroids at least a mile in diameter, as well as many more pieces of debris, too small to be seen from Earth, which number in the billions.
In other words, 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 Firma- ment" from the "waters which are above the Firmament" remained a puzzle. What, in God's name, was the Bible talking about?
We have known, of course, that Earth was a watery planet, but it has been assumed that it is uniquely so. Many will undoubtedly recall science-fiction tales wherein aliens come to Earth to carry off its unique and life-giving liquid, water. So even if the ancient texts had in mind Tiamat's, and hence Earth's, waters, and if this was what was meant by the "water which is below the Firmament," what water was there to talk about regarding that which is "above the Firmament"?
We know—don't we?-—that the asteroid belt had, indeed, as the ancient text reported, divided the planets into two groups.
52 GENESIS REVISITED
"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 conventional wisdom was that neither group (again, excepting Earth) had any water.
Well, as a result of the missions of unmanned spacecraft to all the other planets except Pluto, we now know better. Mer- cury, which was observed by the spacecraft Mariner 10 in 1974/75, is too small and too close to the Sun to have retained water, if it ever had any. But Venus, likewise believed to be waterless because of its relative proximity to the Sun, surprised the scientists. It was discovered by unmanned spacecraft, both American and Soviet, that the extremely hot surface of the planet (almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit) was caused not so much by its proximity to the Sun as by a "greenhouse" effect: the planet is enshrouded in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and clouds that contain sulphuric acid. As a result the heat of the Sun is trapped and does not dissipate back into space during the night. This creates an ever-rising temperature that would have vaporized any water that Venus might have had. But did it ever have such water in its past?
The careful analysis of the results of unmanned probes led the scientists to answer emphatically, yes. The topographical features revealed by radar mapping suggested erstwhile oceans and seas. That such bodies of water might have indeed existed on Venus was indicated by the finding that the "hell-like at- mosphere," as some of the scientists termed it, contained traces of water vapor.
Data from two unmanned spacecraft that probed Venus for an extended period after December 1978, Pioneer-Venus I and 2, convinced the team of scientists that analyzed the findings that Venus "may once have been covered by water at an av- erage depth of thirty feet"; Venus, they concluded (Science, May 7, 1982), once had "at least 100 times as much water in liquid form as it does today in the form of vapor.'' Subsequent studies have suggested that some of that ancient water was used up in the formation of the suphuric acid clouds, while some of it gave up its oxygen to oxidize the rocky surface of the planet.
"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
In the Beginning 53
Plate C
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 state- ment.
At the end of the nineteenth century the existence of enig- matic "canals" on Mars was popularized by the telescopic observations of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the American Percival Lowell. This was generally laughed off; and the conviction prevailed that Mars was dry and barren. The first unmanned surveys of Mars, in the 1960s, seemed to confirm the notion that it was a "geologically lifeless planet, like the Moon." This notion was completely discredited when the spacecraft Mariner 9 launched in 1971, went into orbit around Mars and photographed its entire surface, not just the 10 percent or so surveyed by all the previous probes. The results, in the words of the astronomers managing the project, "were astounding." Mariner 9 revealed that volcanoes, can- yons, and dry river beds abound on Mars (Plate C). "Water has played an active role in the planet's evolution," stated Harold Masursky of the U.S. Geological Survey, who headed
54 GENESIS REVISITED
the team analyzing the photographs. "The most convincing evidence was found in the many photographs showing deep, winding channels that may have once been fast-flowing streams. . . . We are forced to no other conclusion but that we are seeing the effects of water on Mars."
The Mariner 9 findings were confirmed and augmented by the results of the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions launched five years later; they examined Mars both from orbiters and from landers that descended to the planet's surface. They showed such features as evidence of several floodings by large quan- tities of water in an area designated Chryse Planitis; channels that once held and were formed by running water coming from the Vallis Marineris area; cyclical meltings of permafrost in the equatorial regions; rocks weathered and eroded by the force of water; and evidence of erstwhile lakes, ponds, and other "water basins."
Water vapor was found in the thin Martian atmosphere; Charles A. Barth, the principal scientist in charge of Mariner 9's ultraviolet measurements, estimated that the evaporation amounted to the equivalent of 100,000 gallons of water daily. Norman Horowitz of Caltech reasoned that "large amounts of water in some form have in past eons been introduced to the surface and into the atmosphere of Mars," because that was required in order to have so much carbon dioxide (90 percent) in the Martian atmosphere. In a report published in 1977 by the American Geographical Union (Journal of Geophysical Research, September 30, 1977) on the scientific results of the Viking project, it was concluded that "a long time ago giant flash floods carved the Martian landscape in a number of places; a volume of water equal to Lake Erie poured . . . scouring great channels."
The Viking 2 lander reported frost on the ground where it came to rest. The frost was found to consist of a combination of water, water ice, and frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice). The debate about whether the polar ice caps of Mars contain water ice or dry ice was resolved in January 1979 when JPL scientists reported at the 2nd International Colloquium on Mars, held at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, that "the north pole consists of water ice," though not so the south pole.
The final NASA report after the Viking missions (Mars: The
In the Beginning 55
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. When the planet was warmer it may have had lakes as large as Earth's Great Lakes in North America and as much as three miles deep. 'This is an almost inescapable conclu- sion," stated Michael H. Carr and Jack McCauley of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1985. At two conferences on Mars held in Washington, DC, in July 1986 under the auspices of NASA. Walter Sullivan reported in The New York Times, sci- entists expressed the belief that ' 'there is enough water hidden in the crust of Mars to theoretically flood the entire planet to an average depth of at least 1,000 feet." Arizona State Uni- versity scientists working for NASA advised Soviet scientists in charge of their country's Mars landing projects that some deep Martian canyons may still have flowing water in their depths, or at least just below the dry riverbeds.
What had started out as a dry and barren planet has emerged, in the past decade, as a planet where water was once abun- dant—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.
The ancient assertion that the asteroid belt separated the waters that were below the Firmament from those that were above it implies that there was water on the celestial bodies that are located farther out. We have already reviewed the latest discoveries of Voyager 2 that confirm the Sumerian de- scription of Uranus and Neptune as "watery." What about the other two celestial bodies that are orbiting between those two outer planets and the asteroid belt, Saturn and Jupiter?
Saturn itself, a gaseous giant whose volume is more than eight hundred times greater than that of Earth, has not yet been penetrated down to its surface—assuming it has, somewhere below its vast atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, a solid or liquid core. But its various moons as well as its breathtaking rings (Fig. 18) are now known to be made, if not wholly then in large part, of water ice and perhaps even liquid water.
56 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 18
Originally, Earth-based observations of Saturn showed only seven rings; we now know from space probes that there are many more, with thinner rings and thousands of ringlets filling the spaces between the seven major rings; all together they create the effect of a disk that, like a phonograph record, is "grooved" with rings and ringlets. The unmanned spacecraft Pioneer 11 established in 1979 that the rings and ringlets consist of icy material, believed at the time to be small pieces of ice a few inches in diameter or as small as snowflakes. 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
In the Beginning 57
sparkling ice," JPL's scientists said. The ice, at some pri- mordial time, had been liquid water.
The several larger moons of Saturn at which the three space- craft, especially Voyager 2, took a peek, appeared to have much more water, and not only in the form of ice. Pioneer 11 reported in 1979 that the group of inner moons of Saturn— Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea—ap- peared to be "icy bodies . . . consisting largely of ice." Voy- ager 1 confirmed in 1980 that these inner satellites as well as the newly discovered moonlets were "spheres of ice." On Enceladus, which was examined more closely, the indications were that its smooth plains resulted from the filling in of old craters with liquid water that had oozed up to the surface and then frozen.
Voyager 1 also revealed that Saturn's outer moons were ice covered. The moon lapetus, which puzzled astronomers be- cause it showed dark and bright portions, was found to be "coated with water ice" in the bright areas. Voyager 2 con- firmed in 1981 that lapetus was "primarily a ball of ice with some rock in its center." The data, Von R. Eshleman of Stan- ford University concluded, indicated that lapetus was 55 per- cent water ice, 35 percent rock, and 10 percent frozen methane. Saturn's largest moon, Titan—larger than the planet Mer- cury—was found to have an atmosphere and a surface rich in hydrocarbons. But under them there is a mantle of frozen ice, and some sixty miles farther down, as the internal heat of this celestial body increases, there is a thick layer of water slush. Farther down, it is now believed, there probably exists a layer of bubbling hot water more than 100 miles deep. All in all, the Voyagers' data suggested that Titan is 15 percent rock and 85 percent water and ice.
Is Saturn itself a larger version of Titan, its largest moon? Future missions might provide the answer. For the time being it is clear that wherever the modern instruments could reach— moons, moonlets, and rings—there was water everywhere. Saturn did not fail to confirm the ancient assertions.
Jupiter was investigated by Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 and by the two Voyagers. The results were no different than at Saturn. The giant gaseous planet was found to emit immense amounts of radiation and heat and to be engulfed by a thick atmosphere that is subject to violent storms. Yet even this
58 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 19
impenetrable envelope was found to be constituted primarily of hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, water vapor, and probably droplets of water, somewhere farther down inside the thick atmosphere there is liquid water, the scientists have con- cluded.
As with Saturn, the moons of Jupiter proved more fasci- nating, revealing, and surprising than the planet itself. Of the four Galilean moons, Io, the closest to Jupiter (Fig. 19), re- vealed totally unexpected volcanic activity. Although what the volcanoes spew is mostly sulphur based, the erupted material contains some water. The surface of Io shows vast plains with troughs running through them, as if they had been carved by running water. The consensus is that 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
In the Beginning 59
than Io. Its surface shows a latticework of veinlike lines that suggested to the NASA teams shallow fissures in a sea of frozen ice. A close look at Europa by Voyager 2 revealed a layer of mushy water ice under the cracked surface. At the December 1984 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Fran- cisco, two scientists (David Reynolds and Steven Squyres) of NASA's Ames Research Center suggested that under Europa's ice sheet there might exist warmer oases of liquid water that could sustain living organisms. After a reexamination of Voy- ager 2 photographs, NASA scientists tentatively concluded that the spacecraft witnessed volcanic eruptions of water and am- monia from the moon's interior. The belief now is that Europa has an ice covering several miles thick "overlaying an ocean of liquid water up to thirty miles deep, kept from freezing by radioactive decay and the friction of tidal forces."
Ganymede, 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. It is thought to be made almost entirely of water ice, with an inner ocean of liquid water near its core. The fourth Galilean moon, Callisto—about the size of the planet Mercury—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. A ring discovered around Jupiter is also made mostly, it not wholly, of ice particles.
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.
60
GENESIS REVISITED
SEEING THE SUN
When we can see the Sun with the naked eye, as at dawn or at sunset, it is a perfect disk. Even when viewed with telescopes, it has the shape of a perfect globe. Yet the Sumerians depicted it as a disk with a triangular rays ex- tending from its round surface, as seen on cylinder seal VA/243 (Plate B and Fig. 6a). Why?
In 1980 astronomers of the High Altitude Observatory of the University of Colorado took pictures of the Sun with a special camera during an eclipse observed in India. The pictures revealed that because of magnetic influences, the Sun's corona gives it the appearance of a disk with triangular rays extending from its surface—just as the Sumerians had depicted millennia earlier.
In January 1983, I brought the "enigmatic representa- tion" on the Sumerian cylinder seal to the attention of the editor of Scientific American, a journal that reported the astronomers' discovery. In response, the editor, Dennis Flanagan, wrote to me on January 27, 1983:
"Thank you for your letter of January 25.
"What you have to say is most interesting, and we may well be able to publish it."
"In addition to the many puzzles posed by this depic- tion," 1 had written in my letter, "foremost of which is the source of the Sumerian knowledge, is now their apparent familiarity with the true shape of the Sun's corona."
Is it the need to acknowledge the source of Sumerian knowledge that is still holding up publication of what Sci- entific American has deemed "most interesting"?
4
THE MESSENGERS OF GENESIS
In 1986 Mankind was treated to a oncc-in-a-lifetime event: the appearance of a messenger from the past, a Messenger of Genesis. Its name was Halley's comet.
One of many comets and other small objects that roam the heavens, Halley's comet is unique in many ways; among them is the fact that its recorded appearances have been traced to millennia ago, as well as the fact that modern science was able, in 1986, to conduct for the first time a comprehensive, close- up examination of a comet and its core. The first fact under- scores the excellence of ancient astronomy; because of the second, data was obtained that—-once again—corroborated an- cient knowledge and the tales of Genesis.
The chain of scientific developments that led Edmund Hal- ley, who became British Astronomer Royal in 1720, to deter- mine, 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 con- cluded that the curve described by comets is elliptical, even- tually bringing these celestial bodies back to where they had been observed before. The "three" comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 were unusual in that they were all orbiting in the "wrong" direction—clockwise rather than counterclockwise; had similar deviations from the general orbital plane of the planets around the Sun—being inclined about 17 to 18 degrees—and were
61
62 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 20
similar in appearance. Concluding they were one and the same comet, he plotted its course and calculated its period (the length of time between its appearances) to be about seventy-six years. He then predicted that it would reappear in 1758. He did not live long enough to see his prediction come true, but he was honored by having the comet named after him.
Like that of all celestial bodies, and especially because of a comet's small size, its orbit is easily perturbed by the grav- itational pull 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; there- fore, although more precise measurements have somewhat nar- rowed the orbital range of Halley's comet from the seventy- four to seventy-nine years that he had calculated, the period of seventy-six years is only a practical average; the actual orbit and its period must be recalculated each time the comet makes an appearance.
The Messengers of Genesis 63
With the aid of modern equipment, an average of five or six comets are reported each year; of them, one or two are comets on return trips, while the others are newly discovered. 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 (Fig. 20) in a little over three years. Most short-period comets av- erage an orbital period of about seven years, which carries them to the environs of Jupiter. Typical of them is comet Giacobini-Zinner (named, like other comets, after its discov- erers), which has a period of 6 1/2 years; its latest passage within Earth's view was in 1985. On the other hand there are the very-long-period comets like comet Kohoutek, which was dis- covered in March 1973, was fully visible in December 1973 and January 1974, and then disappeared from view, perhaps to return in 75,000 years. By comparison, the cycle of 76 years for Halley's comet is short enough to remain in living mem- ories, yet long enough to retain its magic as a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event.
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 (Fig. 21). Still, the Great Comet of
Figure 21
64 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 22
1910, as it was then hailed, was awaited with great appre- hension. There was fear that Earth or life on it would not survive the anticipated passage because Earth would be envel- oped in the comet's tail of poisonous gases. There was also alarm at the prospect that, as was believed in earlier times, the appearance of the comet would be an ill omen of pestilence, wars, and the death of kings. As the comet reached its greatest magnitude and brilliance in May of 1910, its tail stretching over more than half the vault of heaven (Fig. 22), King Edward VII of Great Britain died. On the European continent, a series
The Messengers of Genesis 65
of political upheavals culminated in the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
The belief, or superstition, associating Halley's comet with wars and upheavals was fed by much that was coming to light about events that coincided with its previous appearances. The Seminole Indians' revolt against the white settlers of Florida in 1835, the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618, the Turkish siege of Belgrade in 1456, the outbreak of the Black Death (bubonic plague) in 1347—all were accompanied or preceded by the appearance of a great comet, which was finally recognized as Halley's Comet, thus establishing its role as the messenger of God's wrath.
Figure 23
Whether divinely ordained or not, the coincidence of the comet's appearance in conjunction with major historic events seems to grow the more we go back in time. One of the most celebrated appearances of a comet, definitely Halley's, is that of 1066, during the Battle of Hastings in which the Saxons, under King Harold, were defeated by William the Conqueror. The comet was depicted (Fig. 23) on the famous Bayeux tap- estry, which is thought to have been commissioned by Queen
66 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 24
Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, to illustrate his vic- tory. The inscription next to the comet's tail, Isti mirant stella, means, "They are in awe of the star," and refers to the de- piction of King Harold tottering on his throne.
The year A.D. 66 is considered by astronomers one in which Halley's comet made an appearance; they base their conclusion
The Messengers of Genesis 67
sion 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 de- struction 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 a whole year."
Until recently the earliest certain record of the observation of a comet was found in the Chinese Chronological Tables of Shih-chi for the year 467 B.C., in which the pertinent entry reads, "During the tenth year of Ch'in Li-kung a broom-star was seen." Some believe a Greek inscription refers to the same comet in that year. Modern astronomers are not sure that the 467 B.C. Shih-chi entry refers to Halley's comet; they are more confident regarding a Shih-chi entry for the year 240 B.C. (Fig. 24). 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 ap- pearance of extraordinary celestial bodies—probably comets, they 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., as none of the scholars who have been preoccupied with Halley's comet have realized, was of great significance in Jewish and Near Eastern history. It was the very year in which the Jews of Judea, under the leadership of the Maccabees, revolted against Greek-Syrian domination, recap- tured Jerusalem, and purified the defiled Temple. The Temple rededication ceremony is celebrated to this day by Jews as the festival of Hanukkah ("Rededication"). The 164 B.C. tablet (Fig. 25), numbered WA-41462 in the British Museum, is clearly dated to the relevant year in the reign of the Seleucid (Greek-Syrian) king Antiochus Epiphanes, the very evil King Antiochus of the Books of Maccabees. The unusual celestial object, which the three scholars believe was Halley's comet, 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.
68 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 25
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 1986,1 pointed out that the Hebrew
The Messengers of Genesis 69
name for "comet" is Kokhav shavit, a "Scepler star." This has a direct bearing, I wrote, on the biblical tale of the seer Bilam. When the Israelites ended their wanderings in the desert after the Exodus and began the conquest of Canaan, the Moa- bite king summoned Bilam 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.
In The Stairway to Heaven I provided a chronology that fixed the date of the Exodus at 1433 B.C.; the Israelite entry into Canaan began forty years later, in 1393 B.C. Halley's comet, at an interval of 76 or 77 years, would have appeared circa 1390 B.C. Did Bilam consider that event as a divine signal that the Israelite advance could not and should not be stopped? 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. It is significant that in spite of the crushing defeat of the Judean revolt by the Romans in A.D. 66, the Jews took up arms again some seventy years later in a heroic effort to free Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. The leader of that revolt, Shimeon Bar Kosiba, was renamed by the religious leaders Bar Kokhba, "Son of the Star," specif- ically because of the above-quoted verses in Numbers 24.
One can only guess whether the revolt the Romans put down after three years, in A.D. 135, was also intended as was the Maccabean one, to achieve the rededication of the Temple by the time of the return of Halley's comet, in A.D. 142. The realization that we, in 1986, have seen and experienced the return of a majestic celestial body that had great historic impact in the past, should send a shudder down some spines, mine among them.
How far back does this messenger of the past go? According
70 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 26
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 Solar System, astronomers and physicists believe, was formed out of a primordial cloud of gaseous matter; like every- thing else in the universe, it was in constant motion—circling about its galaxy (the Milky Way) and rotating around its own center of gravity. Slowly the cloud spread as it cooled; slowly the center became a star (our Sun) and the planets coalesced out of the rotating disc of gaseous matter. Thenceforth, the motion of all parts of the Solar System retained the original direction of the primordial cloud, anticlockwise. 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
The Messengers of Genesis 71
previously reviewed, was retrograde—in the opposite direc- tion, clockwise. Its effect on Pluto—which according to the Sumerian texts was GA.GA and was shifted by Nibiru to its present orbit, which is not within the ecliptic but inclined 17 degrees to it—suggests that Nibiru itself followed an inclined path. Sumerian instructions for its observation, fully discussed in The 12th Planet, indicate that relative to the ecliptic it arrived from the southeast, from under the ecliptic; formed an arc above the ecliptic; then plunged back below the ecliptic in its journey back to where it had come from.
Amazingly, Halley's comet shows the same characteristics, and except for the fact that its orbit is so much smaller than that of Nibiru (currently about 76 years compared with Nibiru' s 3,600 Earth-years), an illustration of Halley's orbit (Fig. 26) could give us a good idea of Nibiru's inclined and retrograde path. Looking at Halley's comet, we see a miniature Nibiru! This orbital similarity is but one of the aspects that make this comet, and others too, messengers from the past—not only the historic past, but all the way back to Genesis.
Halley's comet is not alone in having an orbit markedly inclined to the ecliptic (a feature measured as an angle of Declination) and a retrograde direction. Nonperiodic comets— comets whose paths form not ellipses but parabolas or even hyperbolas and whose orbits are so vast and whose limits are so far away they cannot even be calculated—have marked declinations, and about half of them move in a retrograde direction. Of about 600 periodic comets (which are now given the letter "P" in front of their name) that have been classified and catalogued, about 500 have orbital periods longer than 200 years; they all have declinations more akin to that of Halley's than to the greater declinations of the nonperiodic comets, and more than half of them course in retrograde motion. Comets with medium orbital periods (between 200 and 20 years) and short periods (under 20 years) have a mean declination of 18 degrees, and some, like Halley's, have retained the retrograde motion in spite of the immense gravitational effects of Jupiter. It is noteworthy that of recently discovered comets, the one designated P/Hartley-IRAS (1983v) has an orbital period of 21 years, and its orbit is both retrograde and inclined to the ecliptic.
72 GENESIS REVISITED
Where do comets come from, and what causes their odd orbits, of which the retrograde direction is the oddest in as- tronomers' eyes? In the 1820s the Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace believed that comets were made of ice and that their glowing head ("coma") and tail that formed as they neared the Sun, were both made of vaporized ice. This concept was replaced after the discovery of the extent and nature of the asteroid belt, and theories developed that comets were "flying sandbanks"—pieces of rock that might be the remains of a disintegrated planet. The thinking changed again in the 1950s mainly because of two hypotheses: Fred L. Whipple (then at Harvard) suggested that comets were "dirty snowballs" of ice (mainly water ice) mixed with darker specks of sandlike ma- terial; and Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer, proposed that long- period comets come from a vast reservoir halfway between the Sun and the nearer stars. Because comets appear from all di- rections (traveling prograde, or anticlockwise; retrograde; and at different declinations), the reservoir of comets—billions of them—is not a belt or ring like the asteroid belt or the rings of Saturn but a sphere that surrounds the Solar System. This "Oort Cloud," as the concept came to be named, settled at a mean distance, Oort calculated, of 100,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, one AU being the average distance (93 million miles) of the Earth from the Sun. Because of pertur- bations and intercometal collisions, some of the cometary horde may have come closer, to only 50,000 AU from the Sun (which is still ten thousand times the distance of Jupiter from the Sun). Passing stars occasionally perturb these comets and send them flying toward the Sun. Some, under the gravitational influence of the planets, mainly Jupiter, become medium- or short-period comets; some, especially influenced by the mass of Jupiter, are forced into reversing their course (Fig. 27). This, briefly, is how the Oort Cloud concept is usually stated.
Since the 1950s the number of observed comets has increased by more than 50 percent, and computer technology has made possible the projection backward of cometary motions to de- termine their source. Such studies, as one by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory under Brian G. Marsden, have shown that of 200 observed comets with periods of 250 years or more, no more than 10 percent could have entered the
The Messengers of Genesis 73
Figure 27
Solar System from outer space; 90 percent have always been bound to the Sun as the focus of their orbits. Studies of com- etary velocities have shown, in the words of Fred L. Whipple in his book, The Mystery of Comets, that "if we are really seeing comets coming from the void, we should expect them to fly by much faster than just 0.8 kilometers per second," which they do not. His conclusion is that "with few exceptions, comets belong to the Sun's family and are gravitationally at- tached to it."
"During the past few years, astronomers have questioned the simple view of Oort's Cloud," stated Andrew Theokas of Boston University in the New Scientist (February 11, 1988); "astronomers still believe that the Oort Cloud exists, but the new results demand that they reconsider its size and shape.
74 GENESIS REVISITED
They even reopen the questions about the origin of the Oort Cloud and whether it contains "new' comets that have come from interstellar space." As an alternative idea Theokas men- tions that of Mark Bailey of the University of Manchester, who suggested that most comets "reside relatively close to the Sun, just beyond the orbits of the planets." Is it perhaps, one may ask, where Nibiru/Marduk's "distant abode"—its aphelion— is?
The interesting aspect of the "reconsideration" of the Oort Cloud notion and the new data suggesting that comets, by and large, have always been part of the Solar System and not just outsiders occasionally thrust into it, is that Jan Oort himself had said so. The existence of a cloud of comets in interstellar space was his solution to the problem of parabolic and hyper- bolic cometal orbits, not the theory he had developed. In the study that made him and the Oort Cloud famous ("The Struc- ture of the Cloud of Comets Surrounding the Solar System and a Hypothesis Concerning its Origin," Bulletin of the Astro- nomical Institutions of the Netherlands vol. 11, January 13, 1950) Oort's new theory was called by him a "hypothesis of a common origin of comets and minor planets" (i.e., aster- oids). The comets are out there, he suggested, not because they were "born" there but because they were thrust out to there. They were fragments of larger objects, "diffused away" by the perturbations of the planets and especially by Jupiter— just as more recently the Pioneer spacecraft were made to fly off into space by the "slingshot" effects of Jupiter's and Sat- urn's gravitation.
"The main process now," Oort wrote, "is the inverse one, that of a slow transfer of comets from a large cloud into short- period orbits. But at the epoch at which the minor planets (asteroids) were formed . . . the trend must have been the op- posite, many more objects being transferred from the asteroid region to the comet cloud. . . . It appears far more probable that instead of having originated in the faraway regions, comets were born among the planets. It is natural to think in the first place of a relation with the minor planets (asteroids). There are indications that the two classes of objects"—comets and asteroids—"belong to the same 'species.' . . . It seems rea- sonable to assume that the comets originated together with the minor planets." Summing up his study, Oort put it this way:
The Messengers of Genesis 75
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.
It all begins to sound like the Enuma elish. . . .
Placing the origin of the comets within the asteroid belt and considering both comets and asteroids as belonging to the same "species" of celestial objects—objects of a common birth— still leaves open the questions: How were these objects created? What gave "birth" to them? What "diffused" the comets? What gave comets their inclinations and retrograde motions?
A major and outspoken study on the subject was made public in 1978 by Thomas C. Van Flandern of the U.S. Naval Ob- servatory, Washington, D.C. (Icarus, 36). He titled the study, "A Former Asteroidal Planet as the Origin of Comets," and openly subscribed to the nineteenth-century suggestions that the asteroids, and the comets, come from a former planet that had exploded. It is noteworthy that in the references to Oort's work, Van Flandern picked out its true essence: "Even the father of the modern 'cloud of comets' theory was led to con- clude," Van Flandern wrote, "on the basis of evidence then available, that a solar system origin for these comets, perhaps in connection with 'the occurrence which gave birth to the belt of asteroids,' was still the least objectionable hypothesis." He also referred to studies, begun in 1972, by Michael W. Oven- den, a noted Canadian astronomer who introduced the concept of a "principle of least interaction action," a corollary of which was the suggestion that "there had existed, between Mars and Jupiter, a planet of a mass of about 90 times that of Earth, and that this planet had 'disappeared' in the relatively recent past, about 107 [10,000,000] years ago." This, Ovenden further explained in 1975 ("Bode's Law—Truth or Consequences?" vol. 18, Vistas in Astronomy), is the only way to meet the requirement that "the cosmogonic theory must be capable of producing retrograde as well as direct" celestial motions.
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.
76 GENESIS REVISITED
In all probability it was the same event which gave rise to the asteroid belt and which produced most of the me- teors 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 had no doubt, however, that the "breakup event" took place "in the asteroid belt." Physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the re- sulting celestial bodies, he stated emphatically, indicate "that a large planet did disintegrate'' where the asteroid belt is today.
But what caused this large planet to disintegrate? "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...
A key criticism of the destroyed-planet theory has been the problem of the whereabouts of the planet's matter; when as- tronomers estimate the total mass of the known asteroids and comets it adds up to only a fraction of the estimated mass of the broken-up planet. This is especially true if Ovenden's es- timate of a planet with a mass ninety times that of Earth is used in the calculations. Ovenden's response to such criticism has been that the missing mass was probably swept up by Jupiter; his own calculations (Monthly Notes of the Royal As- tronomical Society, 173, 1975) called for an increase in the mass of Jupiter by as much as 130 Earth-masses as a result of the capture of asteroids, including Jupiter's several retrograde moons. To allow for the discrepancy between the mass (ninety times that of Earth) of the broken-up planet and the accretion of 130 Earth-sized masses to Jupiter, Ovenden cited other stud- ies that concluded that Jupiter's mass had decreased some time in its past.
Rather than to first inflate the size of Jupiter and then shrink it back, a better scenario would be to shrink the estimated size of the destroyed planet. That is what the Sumerian texts have
The Messengers of Genesis 77
put forth. If Earth is the remaining half of Tiamal, then Tiamat was roughly twice the size of Earth, not ninety times. Studies of the asteroid belt reveal not only capture by Jupiter but a dispersion of the asteroids from their assumed original site at about 2.8 AU to a zone so wide that it occupies the space between 1.8 AU and 4 AU. Some asteroids are found between Jupiter and Saturn; a recently discovered one (2060 Chiron) is located between Saturn and Uranus at 13.6 AU. The smashup of the destroyed planet must have been, therefore, extremely forceful—as in a catastrophic collision.
In addition to the voids between groups of asteroids, as- tronomers discern gaps within the clusters of asteroids (Fig. 28). The latest theories hold that there had been asteroids in the gaps but they were ejected, all the way to outer space except for those that may have been captured on the way by the gravitational forces of the outer planets; also, the asteroids that used to be in the "gaps" were probably destroyed "by catastrophic collisions"! (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of As- tronomy, 1983). In the absence of valid explanations for such ejections and catastrophic collisions, the only plausible theory is that offered by the Sumerian texts, which describe the orbit of Nibiru/Marduk as a vast, elliptical path that brings it pe- riodically (every 3,600 Earth years, by my calculations) back into the asteroid belt. As Figures 10 and 11 show, the conclu- sion drawn from the ancient texts was that Nibiru/Marduk
Figure 28
78 GENESIS REVISITED
passed by Tiamat on her outer, or Jupiter, side; repeated returns to that celestial zone can account for the size of the "gap" there. It is the periodic return of Nibiru/Marduk that causes the "ejecting" and "sweeping."
By the acknowledgment of the existence of Nibiru and its 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 relatively recent time (millions, not billions, of years ago). Depending on where Jupiter was at the times of Nibiru's perihelion, the accretions might have occurred during various passages of Nibiru and not necessarily as a one-and-only event at the time of the cata- strophic 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" (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Astronomy). The suggested time of the catastrophe is the very time indicated in The 12th 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 cata- strophic event (about 4 billion years ago). They also corro- borate the ancient texts in the vital matter of water.
The presence of water, the mingling of waters, the separation of waters—all somehow played an important role in the tale of Tiamat, Nibiru/Marduk, and the Celestial Battle and its aftermath. Part of the puzzle was already answered when we showed that the ancient notion of the asteroid belt as a divider of the waters "above" and the water "below" is corroborated by modern science. But there was more to this preoccupation with water. Tiamat was described as a "watery monster," and the Mesopotamian texts speak of the handling of her waters by Nibiru/Marduk:
The Messengers of Genesis 79
Half of her he stretched as a ceiling to be 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 planets 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." References to the waters where the Celestial Battle and the creation of the Earth and the Shama'im took place are frequent in the Old Testament, indicating mil- lennia-old familiarity with Sumerian cosmogony even at the time of the Prophets and Judean kings. 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 dish; in both instances, the placing of the asteroid belt "where the waters were" followed the earlier acts of the splitting up of Tiamat and having the invader's "wind" thrust the half that became Earth into a new orbit. The waters of Earth would explain the whereabouts of some or most of Tia- mat's waters. But what about the remains of her other part and of her satellites? If the asteroids and comets are those remains, should they not 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.
Most asteroids belong to two classes. About 15 percent be- long to the S type, which have reddish surfaces made up of silicates and metallic iron. About 15 percent are of the C type: they are carbonaceous (containing carbon), and it is these that have been found to contain water. The water discovered in such asteroids (through spectrographic studies) is not in liquid form; since asteroids have no atmospheres, any water on their
80 GENESIS REVISITED
surface would quickly dissipate. But the presence of water molecules in the surface materials indicates that the minerals that make up the asteroid have captured water and combined with it. Direct confirmation of this finding was observed in August 1982, when a small asteroid that came too close to Earth plunged into the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated; it was seen as "a rainbow with a long tail going across the sky." A rainbow appears when sunlight falls on a collection of water drops, such as rain, fog, or spray.
When the asteroid is more like what its name originally implied, "minor planet," actual water in liquid form could well be present. Examination of the infrared spectrum of the largest and first-to-be-discovered asteroid Ceres shows an extra dip in the spectral readings that is the result of free water rather than water bound to minerals. Since free water even on Ceres will quickly evaporate, the astronomers surmise that Ceres must have a constant source of water welling up from its in- terior. "If that source has been there throughout the career of Ceres," wrote the British astronomer Jack Meadows (Space Garbage—Cornels, Meteors and Other Solar-System Debris), "then it must have started life as a very wet lump of rock." He pointed out that carbonaceous meteorites also "show signs of having been extensively affected by water in times past."
The celestial body designated 2060 Chiron, interesting in many ways, also confirms the presence of water in the remnants of the Celestial Battle. When Charles Kowal of the Hale Ob- servatories on Mount Palomar, California, discovered it in November 1977, he was not certain what it was. He simply referred to it as a planetoid, named it temporarily "O-K" for "Object Kowal," and opined that it might be a wayward sat- ellite of either Saturn or Uranus. Several weeks of follow-up studies revealed an orbit much more elliptical than that of planets or planetoids, one closer to that of comets. By 1981 the object was determined to be an asteroid, perhaps one of others to be found reaching as far out as Uranus, Neptune or beyond, and was given the designation 2060 Chiron. However, by 1989, further observations by astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory (Arizona) detected an extended atmo- sphere of carbon dioxide and dust around Chiron, suggesting that it is more cometlike. The latest observations have also
The Messengers of Genesis 81
established that Chiron "is essentially a dirty snowball com- posed of water, dust and carbon-dioxide ice."
If Chiron proves to be more a comet than an asteroid, it will only serve as further evidence that both classes of these rem- nants of the Genesis event contain water.
When a comet is far away from the Sun, it is a dark and invisible object. As it nears the Sun, the Sun's radiation brings the comet's nucleus to life. It develops a gaseous head (the coma) and then a tail made up of gases and dust ejected by the nucleus as it heats up. It is the observation of these emis- sions that has by and large confirmed Whipple's view of comets as "dirty snowballs," first by determining that the onset of activity in comets as the nucleus begins to heat up is consistent with the thermodynamic properties of water ice, and then by spectroscopic analysis of the gaseous emissions, which have invariably shown the presence of the compound H2O (i.e., water).
The presence of water in comets has been definitely estab- lished in recent years through enhanced examination of arriving comets. 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 findings, it was reported at the time, provided "the first direct proof of water" in a comet. "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. And all scientists concurred with the evaluation by astrophysicists at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich that was seen were "the oldest and essentially unchanged specimens of the material from the birth of the Solar System."
Subsequent cometary observations confirmed these findings. However, none of those studies, accomplished with a variety of instruments, match the intensity with which Halley's comet was probed in 1986. The Halley findings established unequiv- ocally that the comet was a watery celestial body.
Apart from several only partly successful efforts by the United States to examine the comet from a distance, Halley's comet was met by a virtual international welcoming flotilla of
82 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 29
five spacecraft, all unmanned. The Soviets directed to a Comet Halley rendezvous Vega 1 and Vega 2 (Fig. 29a), the Japanese sent the spacecraft Sakigake and Suisei, and the European Space Agency launched Giotto (Fig. 29b)—so named in honor of the Florentine master painter Giotto di Bondone (fourteenth century), who was so enchanted by Halley's comet when it appeared in his time that he included it, streaking across the
The Messengers of Genesis 83
sky, in his famous fresco Adoration of the Magi, suggesting that this comet was the Star of Bethlehem in the tale of the birth of Christ (Fig. 30).
As intensive observations began when Halley's comet de- veloped its coma and tail in November 1985, astronomers at the Kitt Peak Observatory tracking the comet with telescopes reported it was certain "that the comet's dominant constituent is water ice, and that much of the tenuous 360,000-mile-wide cloud surrounding it consisted of water vapor." A statement by Susan Wyckoff of Arizona State University claimed that
i
Figure 30
84 GENESIS REVISITED
"this was the first strong evidence that water ice was preva- lent." These telescopic observations were augmented in Jan- uary 1986 by infrared observations from high-altitude aircraft, whereupon a team made up of NASA scientists and astrono- mers from several American universities announced "direct confirmation that water was a major constituent of Halley's comet."
By January 1986, Halley's comet had developed an immense tail and a halo of hydrogen gas that measured 12.5 million miles across—fifteen times bigger than the diameter of the Sun. It was then that NASA's engineers commanded the space- craft Pioneer-Venus (which was orbiting Venus) to turn its instruments toward the nearing comet (at its perihelion Halley's passed between Venus and Mercury). The spacecraft's spec- trometer, which "sees" the atoms of its subject, revealed that "the comet was losing 12 tons of water per second." As it neared perihelion on March 6, 1986, Ian Stewart, the director of NASA's Halley's project at the Ames Research Center, reported that the rate of water loss "increased enormously," first to 30 tons a second and then to 70 tons a second; he assured the press, however, that even at this rate Halley's comet had "enough water ice to last thousands of more orbits."
The close encounters with Halley's comet began on March 6, 1986, when Vega 1 plunged through Halley's radiant at- mosphere and, from a distance of less than 6,000 miles, sent the first-ever pictures of its icy core. The press dutifully noted that what Mankind was seeing was the nucleus of a celestial body that had evolved when the Solar System began. On March 9, Vega 2 flew within 5,200 miles of Halley's nucleus and confirmed the findings of Vega 1. The spacecraft also revealed that the comet's "dust" contained chunks of solid matter, some boulder size, and that this heavier crust or layer enveloped a nucleus where the temperature—almost 90 million miles from the Sun—was a hot 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
The two Japanese spacecraft, designed to study the effect of the solar wind on the comet's tail and the comet's huge hydrogen cloud, were targeted to pass at substantial distances from Halley's. But Giotto's mission was to meet the comet virtually head-on, swooping at an immense encounter speed within 300 mites from the comet's core. On March 14 (Eu-
The Messengers of Genesis 85
ropean time), Giotto streaked past the heart of Halley's comet and revealed a "mysterious nucleus," its color blacker than coal, its size bigger than had been thought (about half the size of Manhattan Island). The shape of the nucleus was rough and irregular (Fig. 31), some describing it as "two peas in a pod" and some as an irregularly shaped "potato." From the nucleus five main jets were emitting streams of dust and 80 percent water vapor, indicating that within the carbonaceous crust the comet contained "melted ice"—liquid water.
Figure 31
The first comprehensive review of the results of all these close-up observations was published in Nature's special sup- plement of 15-21 May, 1986. In the series of very detailed reports, the Soviet team confirmed the first findings that water (H2O) is the comet's major component, followed by carbon and hydrogen compounds. The Giotto report stated repeatedly that "H2O is the dominant parent molecule in Halley's coma," and that "water vapor accounts for about 80% of the volume of gases escaping from the comet." These preliminary con- clusions were reaffirmed in October 1986, at an international
86 GENESIS REVISITED
conference in Heidelberg, West Germany. 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) re- vealed an explosion on Hailey's Comet that blew 100 cubic feet of ice out of the comet's nucleus.
There was water everywhere on these Messengers of Gen- esis!
Studies have shown that comets coming in from the cold "come to life" as they reach a distance of between 3 to 2.5 AU, and that water is the first substance to unfreeze there. Little significance has been given to the fact that this distance from the Sun is the zone of the asteroid belt, and one must wonder whether it is there that comets come to life because it is where they were born—whether water comes to life there because there is where it had been, on Tiamat and her watery host ___
In the discoveries concerning the comets and the asteroids, something else came to life: the ancient knowledge of Sumer.
The Messengers of Genesis 87
CELESTIAL "SEEING EYES"
When the Anunnaki's Mission Earth reached its full com- plement, there were six hundred of them on Earth, while three hundred remained in orbit, servicing the shuttle craft. The Sumerian term for the latter was IGI.GI, literally "Those who observe and see."
Archaeologists have found in Mesopotamia many objects they call "eye idols" (a), as well as shrines dedicated to these "gods" (b). Texts refer to devices used by the An- unnaki to "scan the Earth from end to end." These texts and depictions imply the use by the Anunnaki of Earth- orbiting, celestial "seeing eyes"—satellites that "observe and see."
Perhaps it is no coincidence that some of the Earth-scan- ning, and especially fixed-position communications satel- lites launched in our own modern times, such as Intelsat- IV and Intelsat IV-A (c, d), look so much like these mil- lennia-old depictions.
5
GAIA: THE CLEAVED PLANET
Why do we call our planet "Earth"?
In German it is Erde, from Erda in Old High German; Jordh
in Icelandic, Jord in Danish. Erthe in Middle English, Airtha in Gothic; and going eastward geographically and backward in time, Ereds or Aratha in Aramaic, Erd or Ertz in Kurdish, Eretz in Hebrew. The sea we nowadays call the Arabian Sea, the body of water that leads to the Persian Gulf, was called in antiquity the Sea of Erythrea; and to this day, ordu means an encampment or settlement in Persian. Why?
The answer lies in the Sumerian texts that relate the arrival of the first group of Anunnaki/Nefilim on Earth. There were fifty of them, under the leadership of E.A ("Whose Home is Water"), a great scientist and the Firstborn son of the ruler of Nibiru, ANU. 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 (Fig. 32). And at the head of the marshlands they established their first set- tlement on a new planet; it was called by them E.RI.DU— "Home In the Faraway"—a most appropriate name.
And so it was that in time the whole settled planet came to be called after that first settlement—Erde, Erthe, 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 honor the first group of Anunnaki who established it.
The Sumerian scientific or technical term for Earth's globe and its firm surface was KI. Pictographically it was represented as a somewhat flattened orb (Fig. 33a) crossed by vertical lines not unlike modern depictions of meridians (Fig. 33b). Since Earth does indeed bulge somewhat at its equator, the Sumerian
88
Figure 32
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 89
Figure 33
90 GENESIS REVISITED
representation is more correct scientifically than the usual mod- ern way of depicting Earth as a perfect globe. . . .
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 "ex- cavation," 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 ce- lestial body that had been cleaved apart."
By calling Earth KI, the Sumerians thus invoked their cos- mogony—the tale of the Celestial Battle and the cleaving of Tiamat.
Unaware of its origin we continue to apply this descriptive epithet to our planet to this very day. 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, Assyr- ian, Hebrew), at all times retaining its geographic or topo- graphic 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 crevicelike narrow ravine outside Jerusalem named after Hinnom, where divine retribution shall befall the sinners via an erupting subterranean fire on Judgment Day.
We have been taught in school that the component geo in all the scientific terms applied to Earth sciences—geo-graphy, goo-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.
Scholars agree that the Greek notions of primordial events and of the gods were borrowed from the Near East, through Asia Minor (at whose western edge early Greek settlements like Troy were located) and via the island of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean. According to Greek tradition Zeus, who was
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 91
Figure 34
the chief god of the twelve Olympians, arrived on the Greek mainland via Crete, whence he had fled after abducting the beautiful Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king of Tyre. Aphrodite arrived from the Near East via the island of Cyprus. Poseidon (whom the Romans called Neptune) came on horse- back via Asia Minor, and Athena brought the olive to Greece from the lands of the Bible. There is no doubt that the Greek alphabet developed from a Near Eastern one (Fig. 34). Cyrus
92 GENESIS REVISITED
H. Gordon (Forgotten Scripts: Evidence for the Minoan Lan- guage and other works) deciphered the enigmatic Cretan script known as Linear A by showing that it represented a Semitic, Near Eastern language. With the Near Eastern gods and the terminology came also the "myths" and legends.
The earliest Greek writings concerning antiquity and the affairs of gods and men were the Iliad, by Homer; the Odes of Pindar of Thebes; and above all the Theogony ("Divine Genealogy") by Hesiod, who composed this work and another (Works and Days). In the eighth century B.C., Hesiod began the divine tale of events that ultimately led to the supremacy of Zeus—a story of passions, rivalries, and struggles covered in The Wars of Gods and Men, third book of my series The Earth Chronicles—and the creation of the celestial gods, of Heaven and Earth out of Chaos, a tale not unlike the biblical Beginning:
Verily, at first Chaos came to be,
and next the wide-bosomed Gaia--
she who created all the immortal ones
who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus:
Dim Tartarus, wide-pathed in the depths,
and Eros, fairest among the divine immortals. . . . From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Nyx; And of Nyx were born Aether and Hemera.
At this point in the process of the formation of the "divine immortals"—the celestial gods—"Heaven" does not yet ex- ist, just as the Mesopotamian sources recounted. Accordingly, the "Gaia" of these verses is the equivalent of Tiamat, "she who bore them all" according to the Enuma elish. Hesiod lists the celestial gods who followed "Chaos" and "Gaia" in three pairs (Tartarus and Eros, Erebus and Nyx, Aether and Hemera). The parallel with the creation of the three pairs in Sumerian cosmogony (nowadays named Venus and Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune) should be obvious (though this comparability seems to have gone unnoticed).
Only after the creation of the principal planets that made up the Solar System when Nibiru appeared to invade it does the tale by Hesiod—as in the Mesopotamian and biblical texts— speak of the creation of Ouranos, "Heaven." As explained in
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 93
the Book of Genesis, this Shama'im was the Hammered-Out- Bracelet, the asteroid belt. As related in the Enuma elish, this was the half of Tiamat that was smashed to pieces, while the other, intact half became Earth. All this is echoed in the ensuing verses of Hesiod's Theogony:
And Gaia then bore starry Ouranos —equal to herself--
to envelop her on every side,
to be an everlasting abode place for the gods.
Equally split up. Gaia ceased to be Tiamat. Severed from the smashed-up half that became the Firmament, everlasting abode of the asteroids and comets, the intact half (thrust into another orbit) became Gaia, the Earth. And so did this planet, first as Tiamat and then as Earth, live up to its epithets: Gaia, Gi, Ki—the Cleaved One.
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 (now 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
94 GENESIS REVISITED
that throughout 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 sci- ence—knowledge, the Sumerians asserted, bestowed by the Anunnaki.
According to that ancient knowledge, Earth was not an orig- inal member of the Solar System. It was the cleaved-off half of a planet then called Tiamat, "she who bore them all." The Celestial Battle that led to the creation of Earth occurred several hundred million years after the Solar System with its planets had been created. Earth, as a part of Tiamat, retained much of the water that Tiamat, "the watery monster," was known for. As Earth evolved into an independent planet and attained the shape of a globe dictated by the forces of gravity, the waters were gathered into the immense cavity on the torn-off side, and dry land appeared on the other side of the planet
This, in summary, is what the ancient peoples firmly be- lieved. What does modern science have to say?
The theories concerning planetary formation hold that they started as balls congealing from the gaseous disk extending from the Sun. As they cooled, heavier matter—iron, in Earth's case—sank into their centers, forming a solid inner core. A less solid, plastic, or even fluid outer core surrounded the inner one; in Earth's case, it is believed to consist of molten iron. The two cores and their motions act as a dynamo, producing the planet's magnetic field. Surrounding the solid and fluid cores is a mantle made of rocks and minerals; on Earth it is estimated to be some 1,800 miles thick. While the fluidity and heat generated at the planet's core (some 12,000 degrees Fahr- enheit in the Earth's center) affect the mantle and what is on top of it, it is the uppermost 400 miles or so of the mantle (on Earth) that mostly account for what we see on the surface of the planet—its cooled crust.
The processes that produce, over billions of years, a spher- ical orb—the uniform force of gravity and the planet's rotation around its axis—should also result in an orderly layering. The solid inner core, the flexible or fluid outer core, the thick lower mantle of silicates, the upper mantle of rocks, and the upper- most crust should encompass one another in ordered layers,
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 95
Figure 35
like the skin of an onion. This holds true for the orb called Earth (Fig. 35)—but only up to a point; the main abnormalities concern Earth's uppermost layer, the crust.
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 of 1 percent of the Earth's land- mass. In 1988, geophysicists from Caltech and the University of Illinois at Urbana, led by Don Anderson, reported to the American Geological Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, that they had found the "missing crust." By analyzing shock waves from earthquakes, they concluded that material that be- longs 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 land- mass—still only about half of what seems to be the norm (judging by the Moon and Mars); half of the Earth's crust wi!i
96 GENESIS REVISITED
still be missing even if the findings by this group prove correct. The theory also 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. The team's suggestion was that the crustal material down there consists of "huge slabs of crust" that "dived into the Earth's interior" where fissures exist in the crust. But what force had broken up the crust into such "huge slabs"?
Figure 36
Another abnormality of the Earth's crust is that it is not uniform. In the parts we call "continents," its thickness varies from about 12 miles to almost 45 miles; but in the parts taken up by the oceans the crust is only 3.5 to five miles thick. While the average elevation of the continents is about 2,300 feet, the average depth of the oceans is more than 12,500 feet. The combined result of these factors is that the much thicker con- tinental crust reaches much farther down into the mantle, whereas the oceanic crust is just a thin layer of solidified ma- terial and sediments (Fig. 36).
There are other differences between the Earth's crust where the continents are and where the oceans are. The composition
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 97
of the continental crust, consisting in large part of rocks re- sembling granite, is relatively light in comparison with the composition of the mantle: the average continental density is 2.7-2.8 grams per cubic centimeter, while that of the mantle is 3.3 grams per cubic centimeter. The oceanic crust is heavier and denser than the continental crust, averaging a density of 3.0 to 3.1 grams per cubic centimeter; it is thus more akin to the mantle, with its composition of basaltic and other dense rocks, than to the continental crust. It is noteworthy that the "missing crust" the scientific team mentioned above suggested had dived into the mantle is similar in composition to the oceanic crust, not to the continental crust.
This leads to one more important difference between the Earth's continental and oceanic crusts. The continental part of the crust is not only lighter and thicker, it is also much older than the oceanic part of the crust. By the end of the 1970s the consensus among scientists was that the greater part of today's continental surface was formed some 2.8 billion years ago. Evidence of a continental crust from that time that was about as thick as today's is found in all the continents in what ge- ologists term Archean Shield areas; but within those areas, crustal rocks were discovered that turned out to be 3.8 billion years old. In 1983, however, geologists of the Australian Na- tional University found, in western Australia, rock remains of a continental crust whose age was established to be 4.1 to 4.2 billion years old. In 1989, tests with new, sophisticated meth- ods on rock samples collected a few years earlier in northern Canada (by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and from the Geological Survey of Canada) determined the rocks' age to be 3.96 billion years; Samuel Bowering of Washington University reported evidence that nearby rocks in the area were as much as 4.1 billion years old.
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.
98 GENESIS REVISITED
This is a tremendous difference that no amount of speculation about rising and sinking continents, forming and vanishing seas can explain. Someone has compared the Earth's crust to the skin of an apple. Where the oceans are, the "skin" is fresh— relatively speaking, born yesterday. Where the oceans began in primordial times, the "skin," and a good part of the "apple" itself, appear to have been shorn off.
The differences between the continental and oceanic crusts must have been even greater in earlier times, because the con- tinental 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 on the surface of the Earth where it was so "wounded" is the Pacific Ocean. While the average plunge in the crust's surface in its oceanic parts is about 2.5 miles, in the Pacific the crust has been gouged out to a present depth reaching at some points 7 miles. If we could remove from the Pacific's floor the crust built up there over the last 200 million years, we would arrive at depths reaching 12 miles below the water's surface and between some 20 to nearly 60 miles below the continental surface. This is quite a cavity. . . . How deep was it before the crustal buildup over the past 200 million years—how large was the "wound" 500 million years ago, a billion years ago, 4 billion years ago? No one can even guess, except to say that it was substantially deeper.
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 million years) it has been shrinking. The reason
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 99
for the shrinkage is that the continents flanking it—the Amer- icas on the east, Asia and Australia on the west—are moving closer to each other, squeezing out the Pacific slowly but re- lentlessly, 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. Its origin lies, as in the study of the Solar System, in the discarding of notions of a uniform, stable, permanent condition of the planets in favor of the recognition of catastrophism, change, and even evolution—concerning not only flora and fauna but the globes on which they evolved as "living" entities that can grow and shrink, prosper and suffer, even be born and die.
The new science of plate tectonics, it is now generally rec- ognized, owes its beginning to Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, and his book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, published in 1915. As it was for others before him, his starting point was the obvious "fit" between the contours of the continents on both sides of the southern At- lantic. But before Wegener's ideas, the solution had been to postulate the disappearance, by sinking, of continents or land bridges: the belief that the continents have been where they are from time immemorial, but that a midsection sank below sea level, giving the appearance of continental separation. Aug- menting available data on flora and fauna with considerable geological "matches" between the two sides of the Atlantic, Wegener came up with the notion of Pangaea—a supercon- tinent, a single huge landmass into which he could fit all the present continental masses like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Pan- gaea, which covered about one half of the globe, Wegener suggested, was surrounded by the primeval Pacific Ocean. Floating in the midst of the waters like an ice floe, the single landmass underwent a series of liftings and healings until a definite and final breakup in the Mesozoic Era, the geological period that lasted from 225 to 65 million years ago. Gradually the pieces began to drift apart. Antarctica, Australia, India, and Africa began to break away and separate (Fig. 37a). Sub- sequently, Africa and South America split apart (Fig. 37b) as North America began to move away from Europe and India was thrust toward Asia (Fig. 37c); and so the continents con- tinued to drift until they rearranged themselves in the pattern we know today (Fig. 37d).
100 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 37
The split-up of Pangaea into several separate continents was accompanied by the opening up and closing down of bodies of water between the separating pieces of the landmass. In time the single "Panocean" (if I may be allowed to coin a term) also separated into a series of connecting oceans or enclosed seas (such as the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian seas), and such major bodies of water as the Atlantic and the Indian oceans took shape. But all these bodies of water were "pieces" of the original "Panocean," of which the Pacific Ocean still remains.
Wegener's view of the continents as "pieces of a cracked ice floe" shifting atop an impermanent surface of the Earth was mostly received with disdain, even ridicule, by the ge- ologists and paleontologists of the time. It took half a century for the idea of Continental Drift to be accepted into the halls of science. What helped bring about the changed attitude were surveys of the ocean floors begun in the 1960s that revealed such features as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that, it was surmised, was formed by the rise of molten rock (called "magma") from
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 101
the Earth's interior. Welling up, in the case of the Atlantic, through a fissure in the ocean floor that runs almost the whole ocean's length, the magma cooled and formed a ridge of bas- altic rock. But then as one welling up followed another, the old sides of the ridge were pushed to either side to make way for the new magma flow. A major advance in these studies of the ocean floors took place with the aid of Seasat, an ocean- ographic satellite launched in June 1978 that orbited the Earth for three months; its data were used to map the sea floors, giving us an entirely new understanding of our oceans, with their ridges, rifts, seamounts, underwater volcanoes, and frac- ture zones. The discovery that as each upwelling of magma cooled and solidified it retained the magnetic direction of its position at that time was followed by the determination that a series of such magnetic lines, almost parallel to one another, provided a time scale as well as a directional map for the ongoing expansion of the ocean's floor. This expansion of the sea floor in the Atlantic was a major factor in pushing apart Africa and South America and in the creation of the Atlantic Ocean (and its continuing widening).
Other forces, such as the gravitational pull of the Moon, the Earth's rotation, and even movements of the underlying man- tle, also are believed to act to split up the continental crust and shift the continents about. These forces also exert their influ- ence, naturally, in the Pacific region. The Pacific Ocean re- vealed even more midocean ridges, fissures, underwater volcanoes, and other features like those that have worked to expand the Atlantic Ocean. Why, then, as all the evidence shows, have the landmasses flanking the Pacific not moved apart (as the continents flanking the Atlantic have done) but rather keep moving closer, slowly but surely, constantly re- ducing the size of the Pacific Ocean?
The explanation is found in a companion theory of conti- nental drift, the Theory of Plate Tectonics. The continents, it has been postulated, rest upon giant movable "plates" of the Earth's crust, and so do the oceans. When the continents drift, when oceans expand (as the Atlantic) or contract (as the Pa- cific), the underlying cause is the movement of the plates on which they ride. At present scientists recognize six major plates (some of which are further subdivided): the Pacific, American, Eurasian, African, Indo-Australian, and Antarctic (Fig. 38).
102 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 38
The spreading seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean is still distancing the Americas from Europe and Africa, inch by inch. The con- comitant shrinking of the Pacific Ocean is now recognized to be accommodated by the dipping, or "subduction," of the Pacific plate under the American plate. This is the primary cause of the crustal shifts and earthquakes all along the Pacific rim, as well as of the rise of the major mountain chains along that rim. The collision of the Indian plate with the Eurasian one created the Himalayas and fused the Indian subcontinent to Asia. In 1985, Cornell University scientists discovered the "geological suture" where a part of the western African plate remained attached to the American plate when the two broke apart some fifty million years ago, "donating" Florida and southern Georgia to North America.
With some modifications, almost all scientists today accept Wegener's hypothesis of an Earth initially consisting of a single landmass surrounded by an all-embracing ocean. Notwith- standing (geologically) the young age (200 million years) of the present seafloor, scholars recognize that there had been a primeval ocean on Earth whose traces can be found not in the newly covered depths of the oceans but on the continents. The Archean Shield zones, where the youngest rocks are 2.8 billion years old, contain belts of two kinds: one of greenstone, another of granite-gneiss. Writing in Scientific American of March, 1977, Stephen Moorbath ('The Oldest Rocks and the Growth of Continents"") reported (hat geologists "believe that the
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 103
greenstone belt rocks were deposited in a primitive oceanic environment and in effect represent ancient oceans, and that the granite-gneiss terrains may be remnants of ancient oceans.'' Extensive rock records in virtually all the continents indicate that they were contiguous to oceans of water for more than three billion years; in some places, such as Zimbabwe in south- ern Africa, sedimentary rocks show that they accreted within large bodies of water some 3.5 billion years ago. And recent advances in scientific dating have extended the age of the Archean belts—those that include rocks that had been depos- ited in primeval oceans—back to 3.8 billion years (Scientific American, September, 1983; special issue: "The Dynamic Earth").
How long has continental drift been going on? Was there a Pangaea?
Stephen Moorbath, in the above-mentioned study, offered the conclusion that the process of continental breakup began some 600 million years ago: "Before that there may have been just the one immense supercontinent known as Pangaea, or possibly two supercontinents: Laurasia to the north and Gond- wanaland to the south." Other scientists, using computer sim- ulations, suggest that 550 million years ago the landmasses that eventually formed Pangaea or its two connected parts were no less separate than they are today, that plate-tectonic pro- cesses of one kind or another have been going on since at least about four billion years ago. But whether the mass of dry land was first a single supercontinent or separate landmasses that then joined, 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 land mass/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
104 GENESIS REVISITED
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 disklike 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. We find that the Old Testament repeatedly referred to the "founda- tions" of Earth and expressed knowledge of the earlier times regarding the shape of Earth in the following verses praising the Creator:
The Lord's is the Earth and its entirety, the world and all that dwells therein. For He hath founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.
(Psalms 24:1-2)
In addition to the term Eretz which means both planet "Earth" and "earth, ground." the narrative in Genesis em- ploys the term Yabashah—literally, "the dried-out land- mass"—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 Te- bel—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 Psalms 18:16):
The Lord thundered from the heavens,
the Most High his sounds uttered.
He loosed his arrows, sped them far and wide; a shaft of lightning, and disconcerted them. The channels of the seabed were revealed,
the foundation of Tebel were laid bare.
With what we know today about the "foundations of the Earth," the word Tebel clearly conveys the concept of conti-
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 105
nents whose foundations—tectonic plates-—are laid in the midst of the waters. What a thrill to discover the latest geo- physical theories echoed in a 3,000-year-old psalm!
The Genesis narrative states clearly that the waters were "gathered together" to one side of the Earth so that the dry land could emerge; this implies the existence of a cavity into which the waters could be gathered. Such a cavity, somewhat over half the Earth's surface, is still there, shrunken and re- duced, in the shape of the Pacific Ocean.
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 of the Solar System? The first Conference on the Origins of Life, held in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1967, under the sponsorship of NASA and the Smith- sonian Institution, dwelt at length on this problem. The only hypothesis the learned participants could come up with was that, at the time the oldest rock specimens that have been found were formed, Earth was subjected to a "cataclysm." 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 sed- iments." This "big belch" was also dated to the same time as the catastrophe recorded by the rocks.
It thus becomes evident that in its specifics—the breakup of the Earth's crust, the process of plate tectonics, the differences between the continental and the oceanic crusts, the emergence of a Pangaea from under the waters, the primordial encircling ocean—the findings of modern science have corroborated the ancient knowledge. They have also led scientists from all dis- ciplines 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 of 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 Sys-
106 GENESIS REVISITED
tern were depicted as celestial gods, male and female, whose creation was compared to birth, whose existence was that of living creatures. In the Enuma elish text, Tiamat in particular was described as a female, a mother who gave birth to a host of eleven satellites, her "horde," led by Kingu "whom she elevated." As Nibiru/Marduk and his horde neared her, "in fury Tiamat cried out aloud, her legs shook to their roots . . . against her attacker she repeatedly cast a spell." When the "Lord spread his net to enmesh her" and "the Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face, Tiamat opened her mouth to consume it"; but then other "winds" of Ni- biru/Marduk "charged her belly" and "distended her body." Indeed, "go and cut off the life of Tiamat" was the order given by the outer planets to the Invader; he accomplished that by "cutting through her insides, splitting her heart. . . . Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life."
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 worlds 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 recently 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 which in 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.
6
WITNESS TO GENESIS
Perhaps as an overreaction to Creationism, scientists have con- sidered the biblical tale of Genesis as a subject of faith, not fact. Yet when one of the rocks brought back from the Moon by Apollo astronauts turned out to be almost 4.1 billion years old, it was nicknamed "the Genesis rock." When a tiny piece of green glass shaped like a lima bean turned up in lunar soil samples gathered by the Apollo 14 astronauts, the scientists dubbed it "the Genesis bean." It thus appears that in spite of all the objections and reservations, even the scientific com- munity cannot escape the age-old faith, belief, gut feelings, or perhaps some genetic memory of the species called Mankind, that a primordial truth underlies the narrative of the Book of Genesis.
However the Moon became a constant companion of Earth— the various theories will soon be examined—it, like Earth, belonged to the same Solar System, and the histories of both go back to its creation. On Earth, erosion caused by the forces of nature as well as by the life that has evolved on it has obliterated much of the evidence bearing on that creation, to say nothing of the cataclysmic event that changed and re- vamped the planet. But the Moon, so it was assumed, had remained in its pristine condition. With neither winds, atmos- phere, nor waters, there were no forces of erosion. A look at the Moon was tantamount to a peek at Genesis.
Man has peered at the Moon for eons, first with the naked eye, then with Earth-based instruments. The space age made it possible to probe the Moon more closely. Between 1959 and 1969, a number of Soviet and American unmanned spacecraft photographed and otherwise examined the Moon either by or- biting it or by landing on it. Then Man finally set foot on the
107
108 GENESIS REVISITED
Plate D
Moon when the landing module of Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon's surface on July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong announced, for all the world to hear: "Houston! Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!"
In all, six Apollo spacecraft set down a total of twelve as- tronauts on the Moon; the last manned mission was that of Apollo 17, in December 1972. The first one was admittedly intended primarily to "beat the Russians to the Moon"; but the missions became increasingly scientific as the Apollo pro- gram progressed. The equipment for the tests and experiments became more sophisticated, the choice of landing sites was more scientifically oriented, the areas covered increased with the aid of surface vehicles, and the length of stay increased from hours to days. Even the crew makeup changed, to include in the last mission a trained geologist, Harrison Schmitt; his expertise was invaluable in the on-the-spot selection of rocks and soil to be taken back to Earth, in the description and evaluation of dust and other lunar materials left behind, and
Witness to Genesis 109
in the choice and description of topographic features—hills, valleys, small canyons, escarpments, and giant boulders (Plate D)—without which the true face of the Moon would have remained inscrutable. Instruments were left on the Moon to measure and record its phenomena over long periods; deeper soil samples were obtained by drilling into the face of the Moon; but most scientifically precious and rewarding were the 838 pounds of lunar soil and Moon rocks brought back to Earth. Their examination, analysis, and study were still in progress as the twentieth anniversary of the first landing was being celebrated.
The notion of "Genesis rocks" to be found on the Moon was proposed to NASA by the Nobel laureate Harold Urey. The so-called Genesis rock that was one of the very first to be picked up on the Moon proved, as the Apollo program pro- gressed, not to be the oldest one. It was "only" some 4.1 billion years old, whereas the rocks later found on the Moon ranged from 3.3 billion-year-old "youngsters" to 4.5 billion- year "old-timers." Barring a future discovery of somewhat older rocks, the oldest rocks found on the Moon have thus brought its age to within 100 million years of the estimated age of the Solar System—of 4,6 billion years—which until then was surmised only from the age of meteorites that struck the Earth.
The Moon, the lunar landings established, was a Witness to Genesis.
Establishing the age of the Moon, the time of its creation, intensified the debate concerning the question of how the Moon was created.
"The hope of establishing the Moon's origin was a primary scientific rationale for the manned landings of the Apollo proj- ect in the 1960s," James Gleick wrote in June 1986 for The New York Times Science Service. It was, however, "the great question that Apollo failed to answer."
How could modern science read an uneroded "Rosetta stone" of the Solar System, so close by, so much studied, landed upon six times—and not come up with an answer to the basic question? The answer to the puzzle seems to be that the findings were applied to a set of preconceived notions; and
110 GENESIS REVISITED
because none of these notions is correct, the findings appear to leave the question unanswered.
One of the earliest scientific theories regarding the Moon's origin was published in 1879 by Sir George H. Darwin, second son of Charles Darwin. Whereas his father put forth the theory regarding the origin of species on Earth, Sir George was the first to develop a theory of origins for the Sun-Earth-Moon system based on mathematical analysis and geophysical theory. His specialty was the study of tides; he therefore conceived of the Moon as having been formed from matter pulled off Earth by solar tides. The Pacific basin was later postulated to be the scar that remained after this "pinching off'' of part of Earth' s body to form the Moon.
Although, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it so mildly, it is "a hypothesis now considered unlikely to be true," the idea reappeared in the twentieth century as one of three con- tenders for being proved or disproved by the lunar findings. Given a high-tech name, the Fission Theory, it was revived with a difference. In the reconstructed theory, the simplistic idea of the tidal pull of the Sun was dropped; instead it was proposed that the Earth divided into two bodies while spinning very rapidly during its formation. The spinning was so rapid that a chunk of the material of which the Earth was forming was thrown off, coalesced at some distance from the bulk of the Earthly matter, and eventually remained orbiting its bigger twin brother as its permanent satellite (Fig. 39).
The "thrown-off chunk" theory, whether in its earlier or renewed form, has been conclusively rejected by scientists from various disciplines. Studies presented at the third Con- ference on the Origins of Life (held in Pacific Palisades, Cal- ifornia, in 1970) established that tidal forces as the cause of the fission could not account for the origin of the Moon beyond a distance of five Earth radii, whereas the Moon is some 60 Earth radii away from the Earth. Also, scientists consider a study by Kurt S. Hansen in 1982 (Review of Geophysics and Space Physics, vol. 20) as showing conclusively that the Moon could never have been closer to Earth than 140,000 miles; this would rule out any theory that the Moon was once part of Earth (the Moon is now an average distance of about 240,000 miles from Earth, but this distance has not been constant).
Witness to Genesis 111
Figure 39
Proponents of the Fission Theory have offered various var- iants thereof in order to overcome the distance problem, which is further constrained by a concept termed the Roche limit (the distance within which the tidal forces overcome the gravita- tional force). But all variants of the fission theory have been rejected because they violate the laws of the preservation of energy. The theory requires much more angular momentum than has been preserved in the energy that exists to spin the Earth and the Moon around their axes and to orbit around the Sun. Writing in the book Origin of (he Moon (1986), John A. Wood of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (" 'A Review of Hypotheses of Formation of Earth's Moon") summed up this constraint thus: "The fission model has very severe dynamic problems: In order to fission, the Earth had to have about four times as much angular momentum as the Earth- Moon system now has. There is no good explanation why the Earth had such an excess of angular momentum in the first
112 GENESIS REVISITED
place, or where the surplus angular momentum went after fis- sion occurred."
The knowledge about the Moon acquired from the Apollo program has added geologists and chemists to the lineup of scientists rejecting the fission theory. The Moon's composition is in many respects similar to that of Earth, yet different in key respects. There is sufficient "kinship" to indicate they are very close relatives, but there are enough differences to show they are not twin brothers. This is especially true of the Earth's crust and mantle, from which the Moon had to be formed, according to the fission theory. Thus, for example, the Moon has too little of the elements called "siderophile," such as tungsten, phosphorus, cobalt, molybdenum, and nickel, com- pared with the amount of these substances present in the Earth's mantle and crust; and too much of the "refractory" elements such as aluminum, calcium, titanium, and uranium. In a highly technical summary of the various findings ("The Origin of the Moon," American Scientist, September-October 1975), Stuart R. Taylor stated: "For all these reasons, it is difficult to match the composition of the bulk of the Moon to that of the terrestrial mantle."
The book Origin of the Moon, apart from its introductions and summaries (such as the above-mentioned article by J. A. Wood), is a collection of papers presented by sixty-two sci- entists at the Conference on the Origin of the Moon held at Kona, Hawaii, in October 1984—the most comprehensive since the conference twenty years earlier that had mapped out the scientific goals of the unmanned and manned Moon probes. In their papers, the contributing scientists, approaching the problem from various disciplines, invariably reached conclu- sions against the fission theory. Comparisons of the compo- sition of the upper mantle of the Earth with that of the Moon, Michael J. Drake of the University of Arizona stated, "rig- orously exclude" the Rotational Fission hypothesis.
The laws of angular momentum plus the comparisons of the composition of the Moon with that of Earth's mantle also ruled out, after the landings on the Moon, the second favored theory, that of Capture. According to this theory, the Moon was formed not near the Earth but among the outer planets or even beyond them. Somehow thrown off into a vast elliptical orbit around
Witness to Genesis 113
the Sun, it passed loo closely to the Earth, was caught by the Earth's gravitational force, and became Earth's satellite.
This theory, it was pointed out after numerous computer studies, required an extremely slow approach by the Moon toward the Earth. This capture process not unlike that of the satellites we have sent to be captured and remain in orbit around Mars or Venus, fails to take into account the relative sizes of Earth and Moon. Relative to the Earth, the Moon (about one- eightieth the mass of Earth) is much too large to have been snared from a vast elliptical orbit unless it was moving very slowly; but then, all the calculations have shown, the result would be not a capture but a collision. This theory was further laid to rest by comparisons of the compositions of the two celestial bodies: the Moon was too similar to Earth and too dissimilar to the outer bodies to have been born so far away from Earth.
Extensive studies of the Capture Theory suggested that the Moon would have remained intact only if it had neared Earth, not from way out, but from the very same part of the heavens where Earth itself was formed. This conclusion was accepted even by S. Fred Singer of George Mason University—a pro- ponent of the capture hypothesis—in his paper ("Origin of the Moon by Capture") presented at the above-mentioned Con- ference on the Origin of the Moon. "Capture from an eccentric heliocentric orbit is neither feasible nor necessary," he stated; the oddities in the Moon's composition "can be explained in terms of a Moon formed in an Earthlike orbit": the Moon was "captured" while forming near Earth.
These admissions by proponents of the fission and the cap- ture theories lent support to the third main theory that was previously current, that of Coaccretion, a common birth. This theory has its roots in the hypothesis proposed at the end of the eighteenth century by Pierre-Simon de Laplace, who said that the Solar System was born of a nebular gas cloud that coalesced in time to form the Sun and the planets—a hypothesis that has been retained by modern science. Showing that lunar accelerations are dependent on eccentricities in the Earth's orbit, Laplace concluded that the two bodies were formed side by side, first the Earth and then the Moon. The Earth and the Moon, he suggested, were sister planets, partners in a binary,
114 GENESIS REVISITED
or two-planet, system, in which they orbit the Sun together while one "dances" around the other.
That natural satellites, or moons, coalesce from the remain- der of the same primordial matter of which their parent planet was formed is now the generally accepted theory of how planets acquired moons and should also apply to Earth and the Moon. As has been found by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, the moons of the outer planets—that had to be formed, by and large, out of the same primordial material as their "parents"— are both sufficiently akin to their parent planets and at the same time reveal individual characteristics as "children" do; this might well be true also for the basic similarities and sufficient dissimilarities between the Earth and the Moon.
What nevertheless makes scientists reject this theory when it is applied to the Earth and the Moon is their relative sizes. The Moon is simply too large relative to the Earth—not only about one-eightieth of its mass but about one quarter of its diameter. This relationship is out of all proportion to what has been found elsewhere in the Solar System. When the mass of all the moons of each planet (excluding Pluto) is given as a ratio of the planet's mass, the result is as follows:
Mercury 0.0 (no moons)
Venus 0.0 (no moons)
EARTH 0.0122
Mars 0.00000002 (2 asteroids) Jupiter 0.00021
Saturn 0.00025 Uranus 0.00017 Neptune 0.00130
Mercury 0.0 (no moons)
Venus 0.0 (no moons)
EARTH 0.0122
Mars 0.00000002 (2 asteroids) Jupiter 0.00021
Saturn 0.00025 Uranus 0.00017 Neptune 0.00130
A comparison of the relative sizes of the largest moon of each of the other planets with the size of the Moon relative to Earth (Fig. 40) also clearly shows the anomaly. One result of this disproportion is that there is too much angular momentum in the combined Earth-Moon system to support the Binary Planets hypothesis.
With all three basic theories unable to meet some of the required criteria, one may end up wondering how Earth ended up with its satellite at all. . . Such a conclusion, in fact, does
Witness to Genesis 115
Figure 40
not bother some; they point to the fact that none of the terrestrial planets (other than Earth) have satellites: the two tiny bodies that orbit Mars are, all are agreed, captured asteroids. If con- ditions in the Solar System were such that none of the planets formed between the Sun and Mars (inclusive) obtained satel- lites in any one of the considered methods—Fission, Capture, Coaccretion—should not Earth, too, being within this moon- less zone, have been without a moon? But the fact remains that Earth as we know it and where we know it does have a moon, and an extremely large one (in proportion) to boot. So how to account tor that?
Another finding of the Apollo program also stands in the way of accepting the coaccretion theory. The Moon's surface as well as its mineral content suggest a "magma ocean'' created by partial melting of the Moon's interior. For that, a source of heat great enough to melt the magma is called for. Such heat can result only from cataclysmic or catastrophic event; in the coaccretion scenario no such heat is produced. How then explain the magma ocean and other evidence on the Moon of a cataclysmic heating?
116 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 41
The need for a birth of the Moon with the right amount of angular momentum and a cataclysmic, heat-producing event led to a post-Apollo program hypothesis that has been dubbed the Big Whack Theory. It developed from the suggestion by William Hartmann, a geochemist at the Planetary Science In- stitute in Tucson, Arizona, and his colleague Donald R. Davis in 1975 that collisions and impacts played a role in the creation of the Moon ("Satellite-sized Planetesimals and Lunar Ori- gin," Icarus, vol. 24). According to their calculations, the rate at which planets were bombarded by small and large asteroids during the late stages of the planets' formation was much higher than at present; some of the asteroids were big enough to deliver a blow that could chip off parts of the planet they hit; in Earth's case, the blown-off chunk became the Moon.
The idea was taken up by two astrophysicists, Alastair G. W. Cameron of Harvard and William R. Ward of Caltech. Their study, "The Origin of the Moon" (Lunar Science, vol. 7, 1976) envisioned a planet-sized body—at least as large as the planet Mars—racing toward the Earth at 24,500 miles per hour; coming from the outer reaches of the Solar System, its path arced toward the Sun—but the Earth, in its formative orbit, stood in the way. The "glancing blow" that resulted (Fig. 41) slightly tilted the Earth, giving it its ecliptic obliquity (currently about 23.5 degrees); it also melted the outer layers of both bodies, sending a plume of vaporized rock into orbit around the Earth. More than twice as much material as was needed
Witness to Genesis 117
to form the Moon was shot up, with the force of the expanding vapor acting to distance the debris from Earth. Some of the ejected material fell back to Earth, but enough remained far enough away to eventually coalesce and become the Moon.
This Collision-Ejection theory was further perfected by its authors as various problems raised by it were pointed out; it was also modified as other scientific teams tested it through computer simulations (the leading teams were those of A. C. Thompson and D. Stevenson at Caltech, H. J. Melosh and M. Kipp at Sandia National Laboratories, and W. Benz and W. L. Slattery at Los Alamos National Laboratory).
Under this scenario (Fig. 42 shows a simulated sequence,
Figure 42
118 GENESIS REVISITED
lasting about eighteen minutes in all), the impact resulted in immense heat (perhaps 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit) that caused a melting of both bodies. The bulk of the impactor sank to the center of the molten Earth; portions of both bodies were va- porized and thrust out. On cooling, the Earth re-formed with the iron-rich bulk of the impactor at its core. Some of the ejected material fell back to Earth; the rest, mostly from the impactor, cooled and coalesced at a distance—resulting in the Moon that now orbits the Earth.
Another major departure from the original Big Whack hy- pothesis was the realization that in order to resolve chemical composition constraints, the impactor had to come from the same place in the heavens as Earth itself did—not from the outer regions of the Solar System. But if so, where and how did it acquire the immense momentum it needed for the va- porizing impact?
There is also the question of plausibility, which Cameron himself recognized in his presentation at the Hawaii con- ference. "Is it plausible," he asked, "that an extra- planetary body with about the mass of Mars or more should have been wandering around in the inner solar system at an appropriate time to have participated in our postulated colli- sion?" He felt that about 100 million years after the planets were formed, there were indeed enough planetary instabilities in the newborn Solar System and enough "proto- planetary remnants" to make the existence of a large impactor and the postulated collision plausible.
Subsequent calculations showed that in order to achieve the end results, the impactor had to be three times the size of Mars. This heightened the problem of where and how in Earth's vicinity such a celestial body could accrete. In response, as- tronomer George Wetherill of the Carnegie Institute calculated backward and found that the terrestrial planets could have evolved from a roaming band of some five hundred planetes- imals. Repeatedly colliding among themselves, the small moonlets acted as the building blocks of the planets and of the bodies that continued to bombard them. The calculations sup- ported the plausibility of the Big Whack theory in its modified Collision-Ejection scenario, but it retained the resulting im- mense heat. "The heat of such an impact," Wetherill con-
Witness to Genesis 119
cluded, "would have melted both bodies." This, it seemed, could explain a) how the Earth got its iron core and b) how the Moon got its molten magma oceans.
Although this latest version left many other constraints un- met, many of the participants in the 1984 Conference on the Origin of the Moon were ready, by the time the conference ended, to treat the collision-ejection hypothesis as the leading contender—not so much out of conviction of its correctness as out of exasperation. "This happened," Wood wrote in his summary, "mainly because several independent investigators showed that coaccretion, the model that had been most widely accepted by lunar scientists (at least at a subconscious level), could not account for the angular momentum content of the Earth-Moon system." In fact, some of the participants at the conference, including Wood himself, saw vexing problems inherent in the new theory. Iron, Wood pointed out, "is ac- tually quite volatile and would have suffered much the same fate as the other volatiles, like sodium and water"; in other words, it would not have sunk intact into the Earth's core as the theory postulates. The abundance of water on Earth, to say nothing of the abundance of iron in the Earth's mantle, would not have been possible if Earth had melted down.
Since each variant of the Big Whack hypothesis involved a total meltdown of the Earth, it was necessary that other evi- dence of such a meltdown be found. But as was overwhelm- ingly reported at the 1988 Origin of the Earth Conference at Berkeley, California, no such evidence exists. If Earth had melted and resolidified, various elements in its rocks would have crystallized differently from the way they actually are found, and they would have reappeared in certain ratios, but this is not the case. Another result should have been the dis- tortion of the chondrite material—the most primordial matter on Earth that is also found in the most primitive meteorites— but no such distortion has been found. One investigator, A. E. Ringwood of the Australian National University, extended these tests to more than a dozen elements whose relative abun- dance should have been altered had the first crust of Earth been formed after an Earth meltdown; but there was no such alter- ation to any significant extent. In a review of these findings in Science (March 17, 1989) it was pointed out that at the 1988
120 GENESIS REVISITED
conference the geochemists "contended that a giant impact and its inevitable melting of Earth do not jibe with what they know of geochemistry. In particular, the composition of the upper few hundred kilometers of the mantle implies it has not been totally molten at any time." "Geochemistry," the authors of the article in Science concluded, "would thus seem to be a potential stumbling block for the giant-impact origin of the moon." In "Science and Technology," (The Economist, July 22, 1989) it was likewise reported that numerous studies have led geochemists "to be skeptical about the impact story."
Like the previous theories, the Big Whack also ended up meeting some constraints but failing others. Still, one should ask whether, while this theory of impact-meltdown ran into problems when applied to Earth, did it not at least solve the problem of the melting that is evident on the Moon?
As it turned out, not exactly so. Thermal studies did, indeed, indicate the Moon had experienced a great meltdown. "The indications are that the Moon was largely or totally molten early in lunar history," Alan B. Binder of NASA's Johnson Space Center said at the 1984 Conference on the Origin of the Moon. "Early," but not "initial," countered other scientists. This crucial difference was based on studies of stresses in the Moon's crust (by Sean C. Solomon of the Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology), as well of isotope ratios (when atomic nuclei of the same element have different masses because they have different numbers of neutrons) studied by D. L. Turcotte and L. H. Kellog of Cornell University. These studies, the 1984 conference was told, "support a relatively cool origin for the Moon."
What, then, of the evidence of meltings on the Moon? There is no doubt that they have occurred: the giant craters, some a hundred or more miles in diameter, are silent witnesses visible to all. There are the maria ("seas"), that, it is now known, were not bodies of water but areas of the Moon's surface flattened by immense impacts. There are the magma oceans. There are glass and glassy material embedded in the rocks and grains of the Moon's surface that resulted from shock melting of the surface caused by high-velocity impacts (as distinct from heated lava as a source). At the third Conference on the Origins of Life, a whole day was devoted to the subject of "Glass on
Witness to Genesis 121
the Moon," so important was this clue held to be. Eugene Shoemaker of NASA and Caltech reported that such evidence of "shock vitrified" glasses and other types of melted rock were found in abundance on the Moon; the presence of nickel in the glassy spheres and beads suggested to him that the impactor had a composition different from that of the Moon, since the Moon's own rocks lack nickel.
When did all these impacts that caused the surface melting take place? Not, the findings showed, when the Moon was created but some 500 million years afterward. It was then. NASA scientists reported at a 1972 press conference and sub- sequently, that "the Moon had undergone a convulsive evo- lution. . . . The most cataclysmic period came 4 billion years ago, when celestial bodies the size of large cities and small countries came crashing into the Moon and formed its huge basins and towering mountains. The huge amounts of radio- active minerals left by the collisions began heating the rock beneath the surface, melting massive amounts of it and forcing seas of lava through cracks in the surface. . . . Apollo 15 found rockslides in the crater Tsiolovsky six times greater than any rockslide on Earth. Apollo 16 discovered that the collision that created the Sea of Nectar deposited debris as much as 1,000 miles away. Apollo 17 landed near a scarp eight times higher than any on Earth."
The oldest rocks on the Moon were judged to be 4.25 billion years old; soil particles gave a date of 4.6 billion years. The age of the Moon, all 1,500 or so scientists who have studied the rocks and soil brought back agree, dates back to the time the Solar System first took shape. But then something happened about 4 billion years ago. Writing in Scientific American (Jan- uary 1977), William Hartmann, in his article "Cratering in the Solar System," reported that "various Apollo analysts have found that the age of many samples of lunar rocks cuts off rather sharply at four billion years; few older rocks have sur- vived." The rocks and soil samples that contained the glasses formed by the intense impacts were as old as 3.9 billion years. "We know that a widespread cataclysmic episode of intense bombardment destroyed older rocks and surfaces of the planets," Gerald J. Wasserburg of Caltech stated on the eve of the last Apollo mission; the remaining question, then, was
122 GENESIS REVISITED
"what happened between the origin of the Moon about 4.6 billion years ago and 4 billion years ago," when the catastrophe occurred.
So the rock found by astronaut David Scott that was nick- named "the Genesis Rock" was not formed at the time the Moon was formed, it was actually formed as a result of that catastrophic event some 600 million years later. Even so, it was appropriately named; for the tale in Genesis is not that of the primordial forming of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago, but of the Celestial Battle of Nibiru/Marduk with Tiamat some 4 billion years ago.
Unhappy with all the theories that have so far been offered for the origin of the Moon, some have attempted to select the best one by grading the theories according to certain constraints and criteria. A "Truth Table" prepared by Michael J. Drake of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory had the Coaccretion theory far ahead of all others. In John A. Wood's analysis it met all the criteria except that of the Earth- Moon angular momentum and the melting on the Moon; oth- erwise it bettered all others. The consensus has now focused again on the Coaccretion theory, with some elements borrowed from the Giant Impact and Fission theories. According to the theory offered at the 1984 Conference by A. P. Boss of the Carnegie Institute and S. J. Peale of the University of Cali- fornia, the Moon is indeed seen as coaccreting with Earth from the same primoridal matter, but the gas cloud within which the coaccretion took place was subjected to bombardments by pla- netesimals, which sometimes disintegrated the forming Moon and sometimes added foreign material to its mass (Fig. 43). The net result was an ever-larger Moon attracting and absorbing other moonlets that were forming within the circumterrestrial ring—a Moon both akin to and somewhat different from the Earth.
Having swung from theory to theory, modern science now embraces as a theory for the origin of our Moon the same process that gave the outer planets their multimoon systems. The hurdle still to be overcome is the need to explain why, instead of a swarm of smaller moons, a too-small Earth has ended up with a single, too-large Moon.
Witness to Genesis 123
Figure 43
For the answer, we have to go back to Sumerian cosmogony. The first help it offers modern science is its assertion that the Moon originated not as a satellite of Earth but of the much larger Tiamat. Then—millennia before Western civilization had discovered the swarms of moons encircling Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—the Sumerians ascribed to Tiamat a swarm of satellites, "eleven in all." They placed Tiamat be- yond Mars, which would qualify her as an outer planet; and the "celestial horde" was acquired by her no differently than by the other outer planets.
When we compare the latest scientific theories with Sumer- ian cosmogony, we find not only that modern scientists have come around to accepting the same ideas found in the Sumerian body of knowledge but are even using terminology that mimics the Sumerian texts. . . .
Just as the latest modern theories do, the Sumerian cos- mogony also describes the scene as that of an early, unstable Solar System where planetesimals and emerging gravitational forces disturb the planetary balance and, sometimes, cause moons to grow disproportionately. In The 12th Planet, I de- scribed the celestial conditions thus: "With the end of the
124 GENESIS REVISITED
majestic drama of the birth of the planets, the authors of the Creation Epic now raise the curtain on Act II, on a drama of celestial turmoil. The newly created family of planets was far from being stable. The planets were gravitating toward each other; they were converging on Tiamat, disturbing and endan- gering the primordial bodies." In the poetic words of the En- uma elish,
The divine brothers banded together;
They disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth. They were troubling the belly of Tiamat
by their antics in the dwellings of heaven.
Apsu [the Sun] could not lessen their clamor;
Tiamat was speechless at their ways.
Their doings were loathsome . . .
Troublesome were their ways;
they were overbearing.
"We have here obvious references to erratic orbits," I wrote in The 12th Planet. The new planets "surged back and forth"; they got too close to each other ("banded together"); they interfered with Tiamat's orbit; they got too close to her "belly"; their "ways"—orbits—"were troublesome"; their gravitational pull was "overbearing"—excessive, disregard- ing the others' orbits.
Abandoning earlier concepts of a Solar System slowly cool- ing and gradually freezing into its present shape out of the hot primordial cloud, scientific opinion has now swung in the op- posite direction. "As faster computers allow celestial me- chanicians longer looks at the behavior of the planets,'' Richard A. Kerr wrote in Science ("Research News," April 14, 1989), "chaos is turning up everywhere." He quoted such studies as that by Gerald J. Sussman and Jack Wisdom of the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology in which they went back by computer simulations and discovered that "many orbits that lie between Uranus and Neptune become chaotic," and that "the orbital behavior of Pluto is chaotic and unpredictable." J. Laskar of the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris found original chaos throughout the Solar System, "but especially among the inner planets, including Earth."
Witness to Genesis 125
George Wetherill, updating his calculations of multicolli- sions by some five hundred planetesimals (Science, May 17, 1985), described the process in the zone of the terrestrial planets as the accretion of "lots of brothers and sisters" that collided to form "trial planets." The process of accretion—crashing into one another, breaking up, capturing the material of others, until some grew larger and eventually became the terrestrial planets—he said, was nothing short of a "battle royal" that lasted most of the first 100 million years of the Solar System.
The eminent scientist's words are astoundingly similar to those of the Enutna elish. He speaks of "lots of brothers and sisters" moving about, colliding with each other, affecting each other's orbits and very existence. The ancient text speaks of "divine brothers" who "disturbed," "troubled," "surged back and forth" in the heavens in the very zone where Tiamat was, near her "belly." He uses the expression "battle royal" to describe the conflict between these "brothers and sisters." The Sumerian narrative uses the very same word—"battle"—- to describe what happened, and recorded for all time the events of Genesis as the Celestial Battle.
We read in the ancient texts that as the celestial disturbances increased, Tiamat brought forth her own "host" with which "to do battle" with the celestial "brothers" who were en- croaching on her:
She has set up an Assembly
and is furious with rage. . . .
Withall, eleven of this kind she brought forth. . . .
They thronged and marched at the side of Tiamat; Enraged, they plot ceaselessly day and night. They are set for combat, fuming and raging; They have assembled, prepared for conflict.
Just as modern astronomers are troubled by the dispropor- tionately large size of the Moon, so were the authors of the Enuma elish. Putting words in the mouths of the other planets, they point to the expanding size and disturbing mass of "Kingu" as their chief complaint:
GENESIS REVISITED
From among the gods who formed her host
her first-born, Kingu, she elevated;
In their midst she made him great.
To be head of her ranks, to command her host, to raise weapons for the encounter,
to be in the lead for combat,
in the battle to be the commander--
these to the hand of Kingu she entrusted.
As she caused him to be in her host,
"I have cast a spell for thee," she said to him;
"I have made thee great in the assembly of the gods; Dominion over the gods I have given unto thee. Verily, thou art supreme!"
According to this ancient cosmogony, one of the eleven moons of Tiamat did grow to an unusual size because of the ongoing perturbations and chaotic conditions in the newly formed Solar System. How the creation of this monstrous moon affected these conditions is regrettably not clear from the an- cient text; the enigmatic verses, with some of the original words subject to different readings and translations, seem to say that making Kingu "exalted" resulted in "making the fire subside" (per E. A. Speiser), or "quieting the fire-god" (per A. Heidel) and humbling /vanquishing the "Power-weapon which is so potent in its sweep"—a possible reference to the disturbing pull of gravitation.
Whatever quieting effect the enlargement of "Kingu" may have had on Tiamat and her host, it proved increasingly dis- ruptive to the other planets. Especially disturbing to them was the elevation of Kingu to the status of a full-fledged planet:
She gave him a Tablet of Destinies, fastened it on his breast. . . .
Kingu was elevated,
had received a heavenly rank.
It was this "sin" of Tiamat, her giving Kingu his own orbital "destiny," that enraged the other planets to the point of "call- ing in" Nibiru/Marduk to put an end to Tiamat and her out- of-line consort. In the ensuing Celestial Battle, as described
126
Witness to Genesis 127
earlier, Tiamat was split in two: one half was shattered; the other half, accompanied by Kingu, was thrust into a new orbit to become the Earth and its Moon.
We have here a sequence that conforms with the best points of the various modern theories regarding the origin, evolution, and final fate of the Moon. Though the nature of the "power- weapon . . . so potent in its sweep" or that of "the fire-god" that caused Kingu to grow disproportionately large remains unclear, the fact of the disproportionate size of the Moon (even relative to the larger Tiamat) is recorded in all its disturbing details. All is there-—except that it is not Sumerian cosmogony that corroborates modern science, but modern science that catches up with ancient knowledge.
Could the Moon have indeed been a planet-in-the- making, as the Sumerians said? As reviewed in earlier chapters, this was quite conceivable. Did it in fact assume planetary aspects? Contrary to long-held views that the Moon was always an inert object, it was found, in the 1970s and 1980s, to possess virtually all the attributes of a planet except its own independent orbit around the Sun. Its surface has regions of rugged and tangled mountains; it has plains and "seas" that, if not formed by water, were probably formed by molten lava. To the sci- entists' surprise the Moon was found to be layered, as the Earth is. In spite of the depletion of its iron by the catastrophic event discussed earlier, it appears to have retained an iron core. Scientists debate whether the core is still molten, for to their astonishment the Moon was found to have once possessed a magnetic field, which is caused by the rotation of a molten iron core, as is true of the Earth and other planets. Significantly, as studies by Keith Runcorn of Britain's University of New- castle-upon-Tyne indicate, the magnetism "dwindled away circa four billion years ago"-—the time of the Celestial Battle.
Instruments installed on the Moon by Apollo astronauts re- layed data that revealed "unexpectedly high heat flows from beneath the lunar surface," indicating ongoing activity inside the "lifeless orb." Vapor—water vapor—was detected by Rice University scientists, who reported (in October 1971) seeing "geysers of water vapor erupting through cracks in the lunar surface.'' Other unexpected findings reported at the Third Lunar Science Conference in Houston in 1972 disclosed on-
128 GENESIS REVISITED
going volcanism on the Moon, which "'would imply the si- multaneous existence near the lunar surface of significant quantities of heat and water."
In 1973, "bright flashes" sighted on the Moon were found to be emissions of gas from the Moon's interior. Reporting this, Walter Sullivan, science editor of The New York Times, observed that it appeared that the Moon, even if not a "living celestial body... is at least a breathing one," Such puffs of gas and darkish mists have been observed in several of the Moon's deep craters from the very first Apollo mission and at least through 1980.
The indications that lunar volcanism may still be going on have led scientists to assume that the Moon once had a full- fledged atmosphere whose volatile elements and compounds included hydrogen, helium, argon, sulfur, carbon compounds, and water. The possibility that there may still be water below the Moon's surface has raised the intriguing question of whether water once flowed on the face of the Moon—water that, as a very volatile compound, evaporated and was dissi- pated into space.
Were it not for budgetary constraints, NASA would have been willing to adopt the recommendations of a panel of sci- entists to explore the Moon with a view to begin mining its mineral resources. Thirty geologists, chemists, and physicists who met in August 1977 at the University of California in San Diego pointed out that research on the Moon—both from orbit and on its surface—had been limited to its equatorial regions; they urged the launching of a lunar polar orbiter, not only because such an orbiter could collect data from the entire Moon, but also with a view to discovering if there is now water on the Moon. "One target of the orbiter's observations," ac- cording to James Arnold of the University of California, "would be small areas near each pole where the Sun never shines. It has been theorized by scientists that as much as 100 billion tons of water in the form of ice are likely to be found in those places. ... If you're going to have large-scale activities in space, like mining and manufacturing, it's going to involve a lot of water, the Moon's polar regions could be a good source."
Whether the Moon still has water, after all the cataclysmic
Witness to Genesis 129
events it has undergone, is still to be ascertained. But the increasing evidence that it may still have water in its interior and may have had water on its surface should not be surprising. After all, the Moon—alias Kingu—was the leading satellite of the "watery monster" Tiamat.
On the occasion of the last Apollo mission to the Moon, The Economist (Science and Technology, December 11,1972) summed up the program's discoveries thus: "Perhaps the most important of all, exploration of the moon has shown that it is not a simple, uncomplicated sphere but a true planetary body.''
"A true planetary body." Just as the Sumerians described millennia ago. And just as they stated millennia ago, the planet- to-be was not to become a planet with its own orbit around the Sun because it was deprived of that status as a result of the Celestial Battle. Here is what Nibiru/Marduk did to "Kingu":
And Kingu, who had become chief among them,
he made shrink, as a DUG.GA.E god he counted him. He took from him the Tablet of Destinies
which was not rightfully his;
He sealed on it his own seal
and fastened it to his own breast.
Deprived of its orbital momentum, Kingu was reduced to the status of a mere satellite—our Moon.
The Sumerian observation that Nibiru/Marduk made Kingu "shrink" has been taken to refer to its reduction in rank and importance. But as recent findings indicate, the Moon has been depleted of the bulk of its iron by a cataclysmic event, resulting in a marked decrease in its density. "There are two planetary bodies within the Solar System whose peculiar mean density implies that they are unique and probably the products of un- usual circumstances," Alastair Cameron wrote in Icarus (vol. 64, 1985); "these are the Moon and Mercury. The former has a low mean density and is greatly depleted in iron." In other words, Kingu has indeed shrunk!
There is other evidence that the Moon became more compact as a result of heavy impacts. On the side facing away from Earth-—its far side—the surface has highlands and a thick
130 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 44
crust, while the near side—-the side facing Earth—shows large, flat plains, as though the elevated features had been wiped off. Inside the Moon, gravitational variations reveal the existence of compacted, heavier masses in several concentrations, es- pecially where the surface had been flattened out. Though outwardly the Moon (as do all celestial bodies larger than a minimal size) has a spherical shape, the mass in its core appears to have the shape of a gourd, as a computer study shows (Fig. 44). It is a shape that bears the mark of the "big whack" that compressed the Moon and thrust it into its new place in the heavens, just as the Sumerians had related.
The Sumerian assertion that Kingu was turned into a DUG.GA.E is equally intriguing. The term, I wrote in The 12th Planet, literally means "pot of lead." At the time I took it to be merely a figurative description of the Moon as " a mass of lifeless clay." But the Apollo discoveries suggest that the Sumerian term was not just figurative but was literally and scientifically correct. One of the initial puzzles encountered on the Moon was so-called "parentless lead." The Apollo pro-
Witness to Genesis 131
gram revealed that the top few miles of the Moon's crust are unusually rich in radioactive elements such as uranium. There was also evidence of the existence of extinct radon. These elements decay and become lead at either final or intermediary stages of the radioactive-decay process.
How the Moon became so enriched in radioactive elements remains an unresolved puzzle, but that these elements had mostly decayed into lead is now evident. Thus, the Sumerian assertion that Kingu was turned into a "pot of lead" is an accurate scientific statement.
The Moon was not only a Witness to Genesis. It is also a witness to the veracity of the biblical Genesis—to the accuracy of ancient knowledge.
132 GENESIS REVISITED
IN THE ASTRONAUTS' OWN WORDS
Feeling changes of "almost a spiritual nature" in their views of themselves, of other humans, and of the possibility of intelligent life existing beyond Earth have been reported by almost all the American astronauts.
Gordon Cooper, who piloted Mercury 9 in 1963 and co- piloted Gemini 5 in 1965, returned with the belief that "in- telligent, extraterrestrial life has visited Earth in ages past" and became interested in archaeology. Edward G. Gibson, a scientist aboard Skylab 3 (1974), said that orbiting the Earth for days "makes you speculate a little more about life existing elsewhere in the universe."
Especially moved were the astronauts of the Apollo mis- sions to the Moon. "Something happens to you out there," stated Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell. Jim Irwin fApollo 15) was "deeply moved ... and felt the presence of God." His comrade on the mission, Al Worden, speaking on the twentieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon on a TV program ("The Other Side of the Moon" produced by Michael G. Lemle) compared the lunar module that was used to land on and take off vertically from the Moon to the spaceship described in Ezekiel's vision.
"In my mind," said Al Worden, "the universe has to be cyclic; in one galaxy there is a planet becoming unlivable and in another part or a different galaxy there is a planet that is perfect for habitation, and I see some intelligent being, like us, skipping around from planet to planet, as South Pacific Indians do on islands, to continue the species. I think that's what the space program is all about. ... 1 think we may be a combination of creatures that were living here on Earth some time in the past, and had a visitation by beings from somewhere else in the universe; and those two species getting together and having progeny. . . . In fact, a very small group of explorers could land on a planet and create successors to themselves who would eventually take up the pursuit of inhabiting the rest of the universe,"
And Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11) expressed the belief that "one of these days, through telescopes that may be in orbit, like the Hubble telescope, or other technical breakthroughs, we may learn that indeed we are not alone in this marvelous
7
THE SEED OF LIFE
Of all the mysteries confronting Mankind's quest for knowl- edge, the greatest is the mystery called "life."
Evolution theory explains how life on Earth evolved, all the way from the earliest, one-celled creatures to Homo sapiens; it does not explain how life on Earth began. Beyond the ques- tion, Are we alone? lies the more fundamental question: Is life on Earth unique, unmatched in our Solar System, our galaxy, the whole universe?
According to the Sumerians, life was brought into the Solar System by Nibiru; it was Nibiru that imparted the "seed of life" to Earth during the Celestial Battle with Tiamat. Modern science has come a long way toward the same conclusion.
In order to figure out how life might have begun on the primitive Earth, the scientists had to determine, or at least assume, what the conditions were on the newly born Earth. Did it have water? Did it have an atmosphere? What of life's main building blocks—molecular combinations of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus? Were they available on the young Earth to initiate the precursors of living organisms? At present the Earth's dry air is made up of 79 percent nitrogen (N2), 20 percent oxygen (O2) and 1 percent argon (Ar), plus traces of other elements (the atmosphere con- tains water vapor in addition to the dry air). This docs not reflect the relative abundance of elements in the universe, where hydrogen (87 percent) and helium (12 percent) make up 99 percent of all abundant elements. It is therefore believed (among other reasons) that the present earthly atmosphere is not Earth's original one. Both hydrogen and helium are highly volatile, and their diminished presence in Earth's atmosphere, as well as its deficiency of "noble" gases such as neon, argon,
133
134 GENESIS REVISITED
krypton, and xenon (relative to their cosmic abundance), sug- gest to scientists that the Earth experienced a "thermal epi- sode" sometime before 3.8 billion years ago—an occurrence with which my readers are familiar by now. . . .
By and large the scientists now believe that Earth's atmo- sphere was reconstituted initially from the gases spewed out by the volcanic convulsions of a wounded Earth. As clouds thrown up by these eruptions shielded the Earth and it began to cool, the vaporized water condensed and came down in torrential rains. Oxidation of rocks and minerals provided the first reservoir of higher levels of oxygen on Earth; eventually, plant life added both oxygen and carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere and started the nitrogen cycle (with the aid of bacteria).
It is noteworthy that even in this respect the ancient texts stand up to the scrutiny of modern science. The fifth tablet of Enutna elish, though badly damaged, describes the gushing lava as Tiamat's "spittle" and places the volcanic activity earlier than the formation of the atmosphere, the oceans, and the continents. The spittle, the text states, was "laying in layers" as it poured forth. The phase of "making the cold" and the "assembling of the water clouds" are described; after that the "foundations" of Earth were raised and the oceans were gathered—just as the verses in Genesis have reiterated. It was only thereafter that life appeared on Earth: green herbage upon the continents and '"swarms" in the waters.
But living cells, even the simplest ones, are made up of complex molecules of various organic compounds, not just of separate chemical elements. How did these molecules come about? Because many of these compounds have been found elsewhere in the Solar System, it has been assumed that they form naturally, given enough time. In 1953 two scientists at the University of Chicago, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, conducted what has since been called "a most striking exper- iment." In a pressure vessel they mixed simple organic mol- ecules of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor, dissolved the mixture in water to simulate the primordial watery "soup," and subjected the mixture to electrical sparks to em- ulate primordial lightning bolts. The experiment produced sev- eral amino and hydroxy acids—the building blocks of proteins.
The Seed of Life 135
which are essential to living matter. Other researchers later subjected similar mixtures to ultraviolet light, ionizing radia- tion, or heat to simulate the effects of the Sun's rays as well as various other types of radiation on the Earth's primitive atmosphere and murky waters. The results were the same.
But it was one thing to show that nature itself could, under certain conditions, come up with life's building blocks—not just simple but even complex organic compounds; it was an- other thing to breathe life into the resulting compounds, which remained inert and lifeless in the compression chambers. "Life" is defined as the ability to absorb nutrients (of any kind) and to replicate, not just to exist. Even the biblical tale of Creation recognizes that when the most complex being on Earth, Man, was shaped out of "clay," divine intervention was needed to "breathe the spirit/breath of life" into him. Without that, no matter how ingeniously created, he was not yet animate, not yet living.
As astronomy has done in the celestial realm, so, in the 1970s and 1980s, did biochemistry unlock many of the secrets of terrestrial life. The innermost reaches of living cells have been pried open, the genetic code that governs replication has been understood, and many of the complex components that make the tiniest one-celled being or the cells of the most ad- vanced creatures have been synthesized. Pursuing the research, Stanley Miller, now at the University of California at San Diego, has commented that "we have learned how to make organic compounds from inorganic elements; the next step is to learn how they organize themselves into a replicating cell."
The murky-waters, or "primordial-soup," hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth envisions a multitude of those earliest organic molecules in the ocean, bumping into each other as the result of waves, currents, or temperature changes, and eventually sticking to one another through natural cell attrac- tions to form cell groupings from which polymers—long- chained molecules that lie at the core of body formation— eventually developed. But what gave these cells the genetic memory to know, not just how to combine, but how to rep- licate, to make the ultimate bodies grow? The need to involve ihe genetic code in the transition from inanimate organic matter to an animate state has led to a "Made-of-Clay" hypothesis.
136 GENESIS REVISITED
The launching of this theory is attributed to an announcement in April 1985 by researchers at the Ames Research Center, a NASA facility at Mountainview, California; but in fact the idea that clay on the shores of ancient seas played an important role in the origin of life on Earth was made public at the October 1977 Pacific Conference on Chemistry. There James A. Law- less, who headed a team of researchers at NASA's Ames fa- cility, reported on experiments in which simple amino acids (the chemical building blocks of proteins) and nucleotides (the chemical building blocks of genes)—assuming they had al- ready developed in the murky "primordial soup" in the sea— began to form into chains when deposited on clays that con- tained traces of metals such as nickel or zinc, and allowed to dry.
What the researchers found to be significant was that the traces of nickel selectively held on only to the twenty kinds of amino acids that are common to all living things on Earth, while the traces of zinc in the clay helped link together the nucleotides, which resulted in a compound analogous to a crucial enzyme (called DNA-polymerase) that links pieces of genetic material in all living cells.
In 1985 the scientists of the Ames Research Center reported substantial advances in understanding the role of clay in the processes that had led to life on Earth. Clay, they discovered, has two basic properties essential to life: the capacity to store and the ability to transfer energy. In the primordial conditions such energy might have come from radioactive decay, among other possible sources. Using the stored energy, clays might have acted as chemical laboratories where inorganic raw ma- tefials were processed into more complex molecules. There was more: one scientist, Armin Weiss of the University of Munich, reported experiments in which clay crystals seemed to reproduce themselves from a "parent crystal"—a primitive replication phenomenon; and Graham Cairns-Smith of the Uni- versity of Glasgow held that the inorganic "proto-organisms" in the clay were involved in "directing" or actually acting as a "template" from which the living organisms eventually evolved.
Explaining these tantalizing properties of clay-—even com- mon clay—Lelia Coyne, who headed one research team, said
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that the ability of the clays to trap and transmit energy was due to "mistakes" in the formation of clay crystals; these defects in the clays' microstructure acted as the sites where energy was stored and from which the chemical directions for the formation of the proto-organisms emanated.
"If the theory can be confirmed," The New York Times commented in its report of the announcements, "it would seem that an accumulation of chemical mistakes led to life on Earth.'' So the "life-from-clay" theory, in spite of the advances it offered, depended, as the "murky-soup" theory did, on ran- dom occurrences—microstructural mistakes here, occasional lightning strikes and collisions of molecules there—to explain the transition from chemical elements to simple organic mol- ecules to complex organic molecules and from inanimate to animate matter.
The improved theory seemed to do another thing, which did not escape notice. "The theory," The New York Times con- tinued, "is also evocative of the biblical account of the Cre- ation. In Genesis it is written, 'And the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground,' and in common usage the primordial dust is called clay." This news story, and the bib- lical parallel implicit in it, merited an editorial in the venerable newspaper. Under the headline "Uncommon Clay," the edi- torial said:
Ordinary clay, it seems, has two basic properties essential to life. It can store energy and also transmit it. So, the scientists reason, clay could have acted as a "chemical factory" for turning inorganic raw materials into more complex molecules. Out of those complex molecules arose life—and, one day, us.
That the Bible's been saying so all along, clay being what Genesis meant by the "dust of the ground" that formed man, is obvious. What is not so obvious is how often we have been saying it to one another, and without knowing it.
The combined murky-soup and life-from-clay theories, few have realized, have gone even further in substantiating the ancient accounts. Further experiments by Lelia Coyne together
138 GENESIS REVISITED
with Noam Lahab of the Hebrew University, Israel, have shown that to act as catalysts in the formation of short strings of amino acids, the clays must undergo cycles of wetting and drying. This process calls for an environment where water can alternate with dryness, either on dry land that is subjected to on-and-off rains or where seas slosh back and forth as a result of tides. The conclusion, which appeared to gain support from experiments aimed at searching for "protocells" that were conducted at the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami, pointed to primitive algae as the first one-celled living creatures on Earth. Still found in ponds and in damp places, algae appear little changed in spite of the passage of billions of years.
Because until a few decades ago no evidence for land life older than about 500 million years had been found, it was assumed that the life that evolved from algae was limited to the oceans. "There were algae in the oceans but the land was yet devoid of life," textbooks used to state. But in 1977 a scientific team led by Elso S. Barghoorn of Harvard discovered in sedimentary rocks in South Africa (at a site in Swaziland called Figtree) the remains of microscopic, one-celled creatures that were 3.1 (and perhaps as much as 3.4) billion years old; they were similar to today's blue-green algae and pushed back by almost a billion years the time when this precursor of more complex forms of life evolved on Earth.
Until then evolutionary progression was believed to have occurred primarily in the oceans, with land creatures evolving from maritime forms, with amphibian life forms as an inter- mediary. But the presence of green algae in sedimentary rocks of such a great age required revised theories. Though there is no unanimity regarding the classification of algae as either plant or nonplant, since it has backward affinities with bacteria and forward affinities with the earliest fauna, either green or blue- green algae is undoubtedly the precursor of chlorophyllic plants—the plants that use sunlight to convert their nutrients to organic compounds, emitting oxygen in the process. Green algae, though without roots, stems, or leaves, began the plant family whose descendants now cover the Earth.
It is important to follow the scientific theories of the ensuing evolution of life on Earth in order to grasp the accuracy of the
The Seed of Life 139
biblical record. For more complex life forms to evolve, oxygen was needed. This oxygen became available only after algae or proto-algae began to spread upon the dry land. For these green plantlike forms to utilize and process oxygen, they needed an environment of rocks containing iron with which to "bind" the oxygen (otherwise they would have been destroyed by oxidation; free oxygen was still a poison to these life forms). Scientists believe that as such "banded-iron formations'1 sank into ocean bottoms as sediments, the single-celled organisms evolved into multicelled ones in the water. In other words, the covering of the lands with green algae had to precede the emergence of maritime life.
The Bible, indeed, says as much: Green herbage, it states, was created on Day Three, but maritime life not until Day Five. It was on the third "day," or phase, of creation that Elohim said:
Let the Earth bring forth green herbage, and grasses that yield seeds, and fruit trees that bear fruit of all kinds
in accordance with the seeds thereof.
The presence of fruits and seeds as the green growth ad- vanced from grasses to trees also illustrates the evolution from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction. In this, too, the Bible includes in its scientific account of evolution a step that modern science believes took place, in algae, some two billion years ago. That is when the "green herbage" began to increase the air's oxygen.
At that point, according to Genesis, there were no "crea- tures" on our planet—neither in the waters, nor in the air, nor on dry land. To make the eventual appearance of vertebrate (inner-skeleton) "creatures" possible, Earth had to set the pat- tern of the biological clocks that underlie the life cycles of all living forms on Earth. The Earth had to settle into its orbital and rotational patterns and be subjected to the effects of the Sun and the Moon, which were primarily manifested in the cycles of light and darkness. The Book of Genesis assigns the fourth "day" to this organization and to the resulting year,
140 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 45
month, day, and night repetitious periods. Only then, with all celestial relationships and cycles and their effects firmly es- tablished, did the creatures of the sea, air, and land make their appearance.
Modern science not only agrees with this biblical scenario but, may also provide a clue to the reason the ancient authors of the scientific summary called Genesis inserted a celestial "chapter" ("day four") between the evolutionary record of "day three"—time of the earliest appearance of life forms— and "day five," when the "creatures" appeared. In modern
The Seed of Life 141
science, too, there is an unfilled gap of about 1.5 billion years—from about 2 billion years to about 570 million years ago—about which little is known because of the paucity of geological and fossil data. Modem science calls this era "Pre- cambrian"; lacking the data, the ancient savants used (his gap to describe the establishment of celestial relationships and bi- ological cycles.
Although modern science regards the ensuing Cambrian pe- riod (so named after the region in Wales where the first geologic data for it were obtained) as the first phase of the Paleozoic ("Old Life") era, it was not yet the time of vertebrates—the life forms with an inner skeleton that the Bible calls "crea- tures." The first maritime vertebrates appeared about 500 mil- lion years ago, and land vertebrates followed about 100 million years later, during periods that are regarded by scientists as the transition from the Lower Paleozoic era to the Upper Pa- leozoic era. When that era ended, about 225 million years ago, (Fig. 45) there were fish in the waters as well as sea plants, and amphibians had made the transition from water to dry land and the plants upon the dry lands attracted ihe amphibians to evolve into reptiles; today's crocodiles are a remnant of that evolutionary phase.
The following era, named the Mesozoic ("Middle Life"), embraces the period from about 225 million to 65 million years ago and has often been nicknamed the '' Age of the Dinosaurs.'' Alongside a variety of amphibians and marine lizards there evolved, away from the oceans and their teeming marine life, two main lines of egg-laying reptilians: those who took to flying and evolved into birds; and those who, in great variety, roamed and dominated the Earth as dinosaurs ("terrible lizards") (Fig. 46).
It is impossible to read the biblical verses with an open mind without realizing that the creational events of the fifth "day" of Genesis describe the above-listed development:
And Elohim said:
"Let the waters swarm with living creatures,
and let aves fly above the earth, under the dome of the sky.'' And Elohim created the large reptilians,
and all the living creatures that crawl
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and that swarmed in the waters,
all in accordance with their kinds,
and all the winged aves by their kinds.
And Elohim blessed them, saying:
"Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas, and let the aves multiply upon the earth."
The tantalizing reference in these verses of Genesis to the "large reptilians" as a recognition of the dinosaurs cannot be dismissed. The Hebrew term used here, Taninim (plural of Tanin) has been variously translated as "sea serpent," "sea monsters," and "crocodile." To quote the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica, "the crocodiles are the last living link with the di- nosaur-like reptiles of prehistoric times; they are, at the same
Figure 46
The Seed of Life 143
Figure 47
time, the nearest living relatives of the birds." The conclusion that by "large Taninim"' the Bible meant not simply large reptilians but dinosaurs seems plausible—not because the Su- merians had seen dinosaurs, but because Anunnaki scientists had surely figured out the course of evolution on Earth at least as well as twentieth-century scientists have done.
No less intriguing is the order in which the ancient text lists the three branches of vertebrates. For a long time scientists held that birds evolved from dinosaurs, when these reptiles began to develop a gliding mechanism to ease their jumping from tree branches in search of food or, another theory holds, when ground-bound heavy dinosaurs attained greater running speed by reducing their weight through the development of hollow bones. A fossil confirmation of the origin of birds from the latter, gaining further speed for soaring by evolving two- leggedness, appeared to have been found in the remains of Deinonychus ("terrible-clawed" reptile), a fast runner whose tail skeleton assumed a featherlike shape (Fig. 47). The dis- covery of fossilized remains of a creature now called Ar- chaeopteryx ("old feather"—Fig. 48a) was deemed to have provided the "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds and gave rise to the theory that the two-—dinosaurs and birds—had an early common land ancestor at the beginning of the Triassic period. But even this antedating of the appearance of birds has come into question since additional fossils of Archaeopteryx
144 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 48
The Seed of Life 145
were discovered in Germany; they indicate that this creature was by and large a fully developed bird (Fig. 48b) that had not evolved from the dinosaurs but rather directly from a much earlier ancestor who had come from the seas.
The biblical sources appear to have known all that. Not only does the Bible not list the dinosaurs ahead of birds (as scientists did for awhile); it actually lists birds ahead of the dinosaurs. With so much of the fossil record still incomplete, paleontol- ogists may still find evidence that will indeed show that early birds had more in common with sea life than with desert lizards.
About 65 million years ago the era of the dinosaurs came to an abrupt end; theories regarding the causes range from climatic changes to viral epidemics to destruction by a "Death Star." Whatever the cause, there was an unmistakable end of one evolutionary period and the beginning of another. In the words of Genesis, it was the dawn of the sixth "day." Modern science calls it the Cenozoic ("current life") era, when mam- mals spread across the Earth. This is how the Bible put it:
And Elohim said:
"Let the Earth bring forth living animals
according to their kind:
bovines, and those that creep,
and beasts of the land,
all according to their kind,"
And it was so.
Thus did Elohim make all the animals of the land according to their kinds,
and all the bovines according to their kinds,
and all those that creep upon the earth by their kinds.
There is full agreement here between Bible and Science. The conflict between Creationists and Evolutionists reaches its crux in the interpretation of what happened next—-the appear- ance of Man on Earth. It is a subject that will be dealt with in the next chapter. Here it is important to point out that although one might expect that a primitive or unknowing society, seeing how Man is superior to all other animals, would assume Man to be the oldest creature on Earth and thus the most developed, the wisest. But the Book of Genesis does not say so at all. On
146 GENESIS REVISITED
the contrary, it asserts that Man was a latecomer to Earth. We are not the oldest story of evolution but only its last few pages. Modem science agrees.
That is exactly what the Sumerians had taught in their schools. As we read in the Bible, it was only after all the "days" of creation had run their course, after "all the fishes of the sea and all the fowl that fly the skies and all the animals that fill the earth and all the creeping things that crawl upon the earth" that "Elohim created the Adam."
On the sixth "day" of creation, God's work on Earth was done.
"This," the Book of Genesis states, "is the way the Heaven and the Earth have come to be."
Up to the point of Man's creation, then, modern science and ancient knowledge parallel each other. But by charting the course of evolution, modern science has left behind the initial question about the origin of life as distinct from its development and evolution.
The murky-soup and life-from-clay theories only suggest that, given the right materials and conditions, life could arise spontaneously. This notion, that life's elemental building blocks, such as ammonia and methane (the simplest stable compounds of nitrogen and hydrogen and of carbon and hy- drogen, respectively) could have formed by themselves as part of nature's processes, seemed fortified by the discovery in recent decades that these compounds are present and even plentiful on other planets. But how did chemical compounds become animate?
That the feat is possible is obvious; the evidence is that life did appear on Earth. The speculation that life, in one form or another, may also exist elsewhere in our Solar System, and probably in other star systems, presupposes the feasibility of the transition from inanimate to animate matter. So, the ques- tion is not can it happen but how did it happen here on Earth?
For life as we see it on Earth to happen, two basic molecules are necessary: proteins, which perform all the complex met- abolic functions of living cells; and nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code and issue the instructions for the cell's pro- cesses. The two kinds of molecules, as the definition itself
The Seed of Life 147
suggests, function within a unit called a cell—quite a complex organism in itself, which is capable of triggering the replication not only of itself but of the whole animal of which the single cell is but a minuscule component. In order to become proteins, amino acids must form long and complex chains. In the cell they perform the task according to instructions stored in one nucleic acid (DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid) and transmitted by another nucleic acid (RNA—ribonucleic acid). Could ran- dom conditions prevailing on the primordial Earth have caused amino acids to combine into chains? In spite of varied attempts and theories (notable experiments were conducted by Clifford Matthews of the University of Illinois), the pathways sought by the scientists all required more "compressive energy" than would have been available.
Did DNA and RNA, then, precede amino acids on Earth? Advances in genetics and the unraveling of the mysteries of the living cell have increased, rather than diminished, the prob- lems. The discovery in 1953 by James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick of the "double-helix" structure of DNA opened up vistas of immense complexity regarding these two chemicals of life. The relatively giant molecules of DNA are in the form of two long, twisted strings connected by "rungs" made of four very complex organic compounds (marked on gene- tic charts by the initials of the names of the compounds, A-G-C-T). These four nucleotides can combine in pairs in sequences of limitless variety and are bound into place (Fig. 49) by sugar compounds alternating with phosphates. The nu- cleic acid RNA, no less complex and built of four nucleotides whose initials are A-G-C-U, may contain thousands of com- binations.
How much time did evolution take on Earth to develop these complex compounds, without which life as we know it would have never evolved?
The fossil remains of algae found in 1977 in South Africa were dated to 3.1 to 3.4 billion years ago. But while that discovery was of microscopic, single-celled organisms, other discoveries in 1980 in western Australia deepened the won- derment. The team, led by J. William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles, found fossil remains of organisms that not only were much older—3.5 billion years—but that
148 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 49
were multicelled and looked under the microscope like chain- like filaments (Fig. 50). These organisms already possessed both amino acids and complex nucleic acids, the replicating genetic compounds, 3.5 billion years ago; they therefore had to represent, not the beginning of the chain of life on Earth, but an already advanced stage of it.
What these finds had set in motion can be termed the search for the first gene. Increasingly, scientists believe that before algae there were bacteria. "We are actually looking at cells which are the direct morphological remains of the bugs them- selves," stated Malcolm R. Walter, an Australian member of the team. "They look like modern bacteria," he added. In fact, they looked like five different types of bacteria whose structures, amazingly, "were almost identical to several mod- ern-day bacteria."
The Seed of Life 149
Figure 50
The notion that self-replication on Earth began with bacteria that preceded algae seemed to make sense, since advances in genetics showed that all life on Earth, from the simplest to the most complex, has the same genetic "ingredients" and the same twenty or so basic amino acids. Indeed, much of the early genetic research and development of techniques in genetic engineering were done on the lowly bacterium Esch- erichia coli (E. coli, for short), which can cause diarrhea in humans and cattle. But even this minuscule, single-celled bac- terium that reproduces not sexually but simply by dividing, has almost 4,000 different genes!
That bacteria have played a role in the evolutionary process is apparent, not only from the fact that so many marine, plant and animal higher organisms depend on bacteria for many vital processes, but also from discoveries, first in the Pacific Ocean and then in other seas, that bacteria did and still make possible life forms that do not depend on photosynthesis but metabolize sulfur compounds in the oceans' depths. Calling such early bacteria "archaeo-bacteria," a team led by Carl R. Woese of the University of Illinois dated them to a time between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago. Such an age was corroborated in 1984 by
150 GENESIS REVISITED
finds in an Austrian lake by Hans Fricke of the Max Planck Institute and Karl Stetter of the University of Regensburg (both in West Germany).
Sediments found off Greenland, on the other hand, bear chemical traces that indicate the existence of photosynthesis as early as 3.8 billion years ago. All these finds have thus shown that, within a few hundred million years of the impen- etrable limit of 4 billion years, there were prolific bacteria and archaeo-bacteria of a marked variety on Earth. In more recent studies (Nature, November 9, 1989), an august team of sci- entists led by Norman H. Sleep of Stanford University con- cluded that the "window of time" when life on Earth began was just the 200 million years between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago. "Everything alive today," they stated, "evolved from organisms that originated within that Window of Time." They did not attempt, however, to establish how life originated at such a time.
Based on varied evidence, including the very reliable iso- topic ratios of carbon, scientists have concluded that no matter how life on Earth began, it did so about 4 billion years ago. Why then only and not sooner, when the planets were formed some 4.6 billion years ago? All scientific research, conducted on Earth as well as on the Moon, keeps bumping against the 4-billion-year date, and all that modern science can offer in explanation is some "catastrophic event." To know more, read the Sumerian texts....
Since the fossil and other data have shown that celled and replicating organisms (be they bacteria or archaeo- bacteria) already existed on Earth a mere 200 million years after the "Window of Time" first opened, scientists began to search for the "essence" of life rather than for its resulting organisms: for traces of DNA and RNA themselves. Viruses, which are pieces of nucleic acids looking for cells in which to replicate, are prevalent not only on land but also in water, and that has made some believe that viruses may have preceded bacteria. But what gave them their nucleic acids?
An avenue of research was opened a few years ago by Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, when he proposed that the simpler RNA might have preceded the much more complex DNA. Although RNA only transmits the genetic
The Seed of Life 151
messages contained in the DNA blueprint, other researchers, among them Thomas R. Cech and co-workers at the University of Colorado and Sidney Altman of Yale University concluded that a certain type of RNA could catalyze itself under certain conditions. All this led to computerized studies of a type of RNA called transfer-RNA undertaken by Manfred Eigen, a Nobel-prize winner. In a paper published in Science (May 12, 1989) he and his colleagues from Germany's Max Planck In- stitute reported that by sequencing transfer-RNA backward on the Tree of Life, they found that the genetic code on Earth cannot be older than 3.8 billion years, plus or minus 600 million years. At that time, Manfred Eigen said, a primordial gene might have appeared "whose message was the biblical in- junction 'Go out into the world, be fruitful and multiply'." If the leeway, as it appears, had to be on the plus side—i.e., older than 3.8 billion years—"this would be possible only in the case of extraterrestrial origin," the authors of the learned paper added.
In her summation of the fourth Conference on the Origin of Life, Lynn Margulis had predicted this astounding conclusion. "We now recognize that if the origin of our self-replicating system occurred on the early Earth, it must have occurred quite quickly—millions, not billions of years," she stated. And she added:
The central problem inspiring these conferences, perhaps slightly better defined, is as unsolved as ever. Did our organic matter originate in interstellar space? The infant science of radioastronomy has produced evidence that some of the smaller organic molecules are there.
Writing in 1908, Svante Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making) proposed that life-bearing spores were driven to Earth by the pressure of light waves from the star of another planetary sys- tem where life had evolved long before it did on Earth. The notion came to be known as "the theory of Panspermia"; it languished on the fringes of accepted science because, at the time, one fossil discovery after another seemed to corroborate the theory of evolution as an unchallenged explanation for the origin of life on Earth.
152 GENESIS REVISITED
These fossil discoveries, however, raised their own questions and doubts; so much so that in 1973 the Nobel laureate (now Sir) Francis Crick together with Leslie Orgel, in a paper titled "Directed Panspermia" (Icarus, vol. 19), revived the notion of the seeding of Earth with the first organisms or spores from an extraterrestrial source—not, however, by chance but as "the deliberate activity of an extraterrestrial society." Whereas our Solar System was formed only some 4.6 billion years ago, other solar systems in the universe may have formed as much as 10 billion years earlier; while the interval between the for- mation of Earth and the appearance of life on Earth is much too short, there has been as much as six billion years available for the process on other planetary systems. "The time available makes it possible, therefore, that technological societies existed elsewhere in the galaxy even before the formation of the Earth," according to Crick and Orgel. Their suggestion was therefore that the scientific community "consider a new 'in- fective' theory, namely that a primitive form of life was de- liberately planted on Earth by a technologically advanced society on another planet." Anticipating criticism—which in- deed followed—that no living spores could survive the rigors of space, they suggested that the microorganisms were not sent to just drift in space but were placed in a specially designed spaceship with due protection and a life-sustain ing environ- ment.
In spite of the unquestionable scientific credentials of Crick and Orgel, their theory of Directed Panspermia met with disbe- lief and even ridicule. However, more recent scientific ad- vances changed these attitudes; not only because of the narrowing of the Window of Time to a mere couple of hundred million years, almost ruling out the possibility that the essential genetic matter had enough time to evolve here on Earth. The change in opinion was also due to the discovery that of the myriad of amino acids that exist, it is only the same twenty or so that are part of all living organisms on Earth, no matter what these organisms are and when they evolved; and that the same DNA, made up of the same four nucleotides—that and no other—is present in all living things on Earth.
It was therefore that the participants of the landmark eighth Conference on the Origins of Life, held at Berkeley, California,
The Seed of Life 153
in 1986. could no longer accept the random formation of life inherent in the murky-soup or life-from-clay hypotheses, for according to these theories, a variety of life forms and genetic codes should have arisen. Instead, the consensus was that "all life on Earth, from bacteria to sequoia trees to humans, evolved from a single ancestral cell."
But where did this single ancestral cell come from? The 285 scientists from 22 countries did not endorse the cautious sug- gestions that, as some put it, fully formed cells were planted on Earth from space. Many were, however, willing to consider that "the supply of organic precursors to life was augmented from space." When all was said and done, the assembled scientists were left with only one avenue that, they hoped, might provide the answer to the puzzle of the origin of life on Earth: space exploration. The research should shift from Earth to Mars, to the Moon, to Saturn's satellite Titan, it was sug- gested, because their more pristine environments might have better preserved the traces of the beginnings of life.
Such a course of research reflects the acceptance, it must be obvious, of the premise that life is not unique to Earth. The first reason for such a premise is the extensive evidence that organic compounds permeate the Solar System and outer space. The data from interplanetary probes have been reviewed in an earlier chapter; the data indicating life-related elements and compounds in outer space are so voluminous that only a few instances must suffice here. In 1977, for example, an inter- national team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute dis- covered water molecules outside our own galaxy. The density of the water vapor was the same as in Earth's galaxy, and Otto Hachenberg of the Bonn Institute for Radio Astronomy con- sidered that finding as support for the conclusion that "con- ditions exist at some other place which, like those on Earth, are suitable for life." In 1984 scientists at the Goddard Space Center found ' 'a bewildering array of molecules, including the beginning of organic chemistry" in interstellar space. They had discovered "complex molecules composed of the same atoms that make up living tissue," according to Patrick Thad- deus of the Center's Institute for Space Studies, and it was "reasonable to assume that these compounds were deposited on Earth at the time of its forming and that life ultimately came
154 GENESIS REVISITED
from them." In 1987, to give one more instance, NASA in- struments discovered that exploding stars (supernovas) pro- duced most of the ninety-odd elements, including carbon, that are contained in living organisms on Earth.
How did such life-essential compounds, in forms that ena- bled life to sprout on Earth, arrive on Earth from space, near or distant? Invariably, the celestial emissaries under consid- eration are comets, meteors, meteorites, and impacting aster- oids. Of particular interest to scientists are meteorites containing carbonaceous chondrites, believed to represent the most primordial planetary matter in the Solar System. One, which fell near Murchison in Victoria, Australia, in 1969, revealed an array of organic compounds, including amino acids and nitrogenous bases that embraced all the compounds in- volved in DNA. According to Ron Brown of Monash Uni- versity in Melbourne, researchers have even found "formations in the meteorite reminiscent of a very primitive form of cell structure."
Until then, carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, first collected in France in 1806, were dismissed as unreliable evidence be- cause their life-related compounds were explained away as terrestrial contamination. But in 1977 two meteorites of this type were discovered buried in the icy wilderness of Antarctica, where no contamination was possible. These, and meteorite fragments collected elsewhere in Antarctica by Japanese sci- entists, were found to be rich in amino acids and to contain at least three of the nucleotides (the A, G, and U of the genetic "alphabet") that make up DNA and/or RNA. Writing in Sci- entific American (August 1983), Roy S. Lewis and Edward Anders concluded that "carbonaceous chondrites, the most primitive meteorites, incorporate material originating outside the Solar System, including matter expelled by supernovas and other stars." Radiocarbon dating has given these meteorites an age of 4.5 to 4.7 billion years; it makes them not only as old as but even older than Earth and establishes their extra- terrestrial origin.
Reviving, in a way, the old beliefs that comets cause plagues on Earth, two noted British astronomers. Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, suggested in a study in the New Scientist (November 17, 1977) that "life on Earth began when
The Seed of Life 155
stray comets bearing the building blocks of life crashed into the primitive Earth." In spite of criticism by other scientists, the two have persisted in pressing this theory forward at sci- entific conferences, in books (Lifecloud and others) and in scholarly publications, offering each time more supportive ar- guments for the thesis that "about four billion years ago life arrived in a comet."
Recent close studies of comets, such as Halley's, have shown that the comets, as do the other messengers from far out in space, contain water and other life-building compounds. These findings have led other astronomers and biophysicists to con- cede the possibility that cometary impacts had played a role in giving rise to life on Earth. In the words of Armand Del- semme of the University of Toledo, "A large number of comets hitting Earth contributed a veneer of chemicals needed for the formation of amino acids; the molecules in our bodies were likely in comets at one time."
As scientific advances made more sophisticated studies of meteorites, comets, and other celestial objects possible, the results included an even greater array of the compounds es- sential to life. The new breed of scientists, given the name "Exobiologists," have even found isotopes and other elements in these celestial bodies that indicate an origin preceding the formation of the Solar System. An extrasolar origin for the life that eventually evolved on Earth has thus become a more ac- ceptable proposition. The argument between the Hoyle-Wick- ramasinghe team and others has by now shifted its focus to whether the two are right in suggesting that "spores"—actual microorganisms—rather than the antecedent life-forming com- pounds were delivered to Earth by the cometary/meteoritic impacts.
Could "spores" survive in the radiation and cold of outer space? Skepticism regarding this possibility was greatly dis- pelled by experiments conducted at Leiden University, Hol- land, in 1985. Reporting in Nature (vol. 316) astrophysicist J. Mayo Greenberg and his associate Peter Weber found that this was possible if the "spores" journeyed inside an envelope of molecules of water, methane, ammonia, and carbon monox- ide—all readily available on other celestial bodies. Pansper- mia, they concluded, was possible.
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How about directed panspermia, the deliberate seeding of Earth by another civilization, as suggested earlier by Crick and Orgel? In their view, the "envelope" protecting the spores was not made up just of the required compounds, but was a spaceship in which the microorganisms were kept immersed in nutrients. As much as their proposal smacks of science fiction, the two held fast to their "theorem." "Even though it sounds a bit cranky," Sir Francis Crick wrote in The New York Times (October 26, 1981), "all the steps in the argument are scientifically plausible." Foreseeing that Mankind might one day send its "seeds of life" to other worlds, why could it not be that a higher civilization elsewhere had done it to Earth in the distant past?
Lynn Margulis, a pioneer of the Origin of Life conferences and now a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, held in her writings and interviews that many organisms, when faced with harsh conditions, "release tough little packages"— she named them "Propagules"—"that can carry genetic ma- terial into more hospitable surroundings" (Newsweek, October 2, 1989). It is a natural "strategy for survival" that has ac- counted for "space age spores"; it will happen in the future because it has happened in the past.
In a detailed report concerning all these developments, head- lined "NASA to Probe Heavens for Clues to Life's Origins on Earth" in The New York Times (September 6, 1988), Sandra Blakeslee summed up the latest scientific thinking thus:
Driving the new search for clues to life's beginnings is the recent discovery that comets, meteors and interstellar dust carry vast amounts of complex organic chemicals as well as the elements crucial to living cells.
Scientists believe that Earth and other planets have been seeded from space with these potential building blocks of life.
"Seeded from space"—the very words written down mil- lennia ago by the Sumerians!
It is noteworthy that in his 'presentations, Chandra Wick- ramasinghe has frequently invoked the writings of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras who, about 500 B.C., believed that
The Seed of Life 157
the "seeds of life" swarm through the universe, ready to sprout and create life wherever a proper environment is found. Com- ing as he did from Asia Minor, his sources, as was true for so much of early Greek knowledge, were the Mesopotamian writ- ings and traditions.
After a detour of 6.000 years, modem science has come back to the Sumerian scenario of an invader from outer space that brings the seed of life into the Solar System and imparts it to "Gaia" during the Celestial Battle.
The Anunnaki, capable of space travel about half a million years before us, discovered this phenomenon long before us; in this respect, modem science is just catching up with ancient knowledge.
8
THE ADAM: A SLAVE MADE TO ORDER
The biblical tale of Man's creation is, of course, the crux of the debate—at times bitter—between Creationists and Evo- lutionists and of the ongoing confrontation between them—at times in courts, always on school boards. As previously stated, both sides had better read the Bible again (and in its Hebrew original); the conflict would evaporate once Evolutionists rec- ognized the scientific basis of Genesis and Creationists realized what its text really says.
Apart from the naive assertion by some that in the account of Creation the "days" of the Book of Genesis are literally twenty-four-hour periods and not eras or phases, the sequence in the Bible is, as previous chapters should have made clear, a description of Evolution that is in accord with modern sci- ence. The insurmountable problem arises when Creationists insist that we. Mankind, Homo sapiens sapiens, were created instantaneously and without evolutionary predecessors by "God." "And the Lord God formed Man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Man became a living soul." This is the tale of Man's creation as told in chapter 2, verse 7 of the Book of Genesis—according to the King James English version; and this is what the Cre- ationist zealots firmly believe.
Were they to learn the Hebrew text—which is, after all, the original—they would discover that, first of all, the creative act is attributed to certain Elohim—a plural term that at the least should be translated as "gods," not "God." And second, they would become aware that the quoted verse also explains why "The Adam" was created: "For there was no Adam to till the land.'' These are two important—and unsettling—hints to who
had created Man and why.
158
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 159
Then, of course, there exists the other problem, that of another (and prior) version of the creation of Man, in Genesis 1:26-27. First, according to the King James version, "God said, Let us make men in our image, after our likeness"; then the suggestion was carried out: "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them." The biblical account is further com- plicated by the ensuing tale in Chapter 2, according to which "The Adam" was alone until God provided him with a female counterpart, created of Adam's rib.
While Creationists might be hard put to decide which par- ticular version is the sine qua non tenet, there exists the problem of pluralism. The suggestion for Man's creation comes from a plural entity who addresses a plural audience, saying, "Let us make an Adam in our image and after our likeness." What, those who believe in the Bible must ask, is going on here?
As both Orientalists and Bible scholars now know, what went on was the editing and summarizing by the compilers of the Book of Genesis of much earlier and considerably more detailed texts first written down in Sumer. Those texts, re- viewed and extensively quoted in The 12th Planet with all sources listed, relegate the creation of Man to the Anunnaki. It happened, we learn from such long texts as Atra Basis, when the rank-and-file astronauts who had come to Earth for its gold mutinied. The backbreaking work in the gold mines, in south- east Africa, had become unbearable. Enlil, their commander- in-chief, summoned the ruler of Nibiru, his father Anu, to an Assembly of the Great Anunnaki and demanded harsh punish- ment of his rebellious crew. But Anu was more understanding. "What are we accusing them of?" he asked as he heard the complaints of the mutineers. "Their work was heavy, their distress was much!" Was there no other way to obtain the gold, he wondered out loud.
Yes, said his other son Enki (Enlil's half brother and rival), the brilliant chief scientist of the Anunnaki. It is possible to relieve the Anunnaki of the unbearable toil by having someone else take over the difficult work: Let a Primitive Worker be created!
The idea appealed to the assembled Anunnaki. The more they discussed it, the more clear their clamor grew for such a
160 GENESIS REVISITED
Primitive Worker, an Adamu, to take over the work load. But, they wondered, how can you create a being intelligent enough to use tools and to follow orders? How was the creation or "bringing forth," of the Primitive Worker to be achieved? Was it, indeed, a feasible undertaking?
A Sumerian text has immortalized the answer given by Enki to the incredulous assembled Anunnaki, who saw in the cre- ation of an Adamu the solution to their unbearable toil:
The creature whose name you uttered— IT EXISTS!
All you have to do, he added, is to
Bind upon it the image of the gods.
In these words lies the key to the puzzle of Man's creation, the magical wand that removes the conflict between Evolution and Creationism. The Anunnaki, the Elohim of the biblical verses, did not create Man from nothing. The being was already there, on Earth, the product of evolution. All that was needed to upgrade it to the required level of ability and intelligence was to "bind upon it the image of the gods," the image of the Elohim themselves.
For the sake of simplicity let us call the "creature" that already existed then Apeman/Apewoman. The process envi- sioned by Enki was to "bind" upon the existing creature the "image"—the inner, genetic makeup—of the Anunnaki; in other words, to upgrade the existing Apeman/Apewoman through genetic manipulation and, by thus jumping the gun on evolution, bring "Man"—Homo sapiens—into being.
The term Adamu, which is clearly the inspiration for the biblical name "Adam," and the use of the term "image" in the Sumerian text, which is repeated intact in the biblical text, are not the only clues to the Sumerian/Mesopotamian origin of the Genesis creation of Man story. The biblical use of the plural pronoun and the depiction of a group of Elohim reaching a consensus and following it up with the necessary action also lose their enigmatic aspects when the Mesopotamian sources are taken into account.
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 161
In them we read that the assembled Anunnaki resolved lo proceed with the project, and on Enki's suggestion assigned the task to Ninti, their chief medical officer:
They summoned and asked the goddess,
the midwife of the gods, the wise birthgiver, [saying:]
"To a creature give life, create workers! Create a Primitive Worker,
that he may bear the yoke!
Let him bear the yoke assigned by Enlil,
Let The Worker carry the toil of the gods!"
One cannot say for certain whether it was from the Atra Hasis text, from which the above lines are quoted, or from much earlier Sumerian texts that the editors of Genesis got their abbreviated version. But we have here the background of events that led to the need for a Primitive Worker, the assembly of the gods and the suggestion and decision to go ahead and have one created. Only by realizing what the biblical sources were can we understand the biblical tale of the Elohim—the Lofty Ones, the "gods"—saying: "Let us make the Adam in our image, after our likeness," so as to remedy the situation that "there was no Adam to till the land."
In The 12th Planet it was stressed that until the Bible begins to relate the genealogy and history of Adam, a specific person, the Book of Genesis refers to the newly created being as "The Adam," a generic term. Not a person called Adam, but, lit- erally, "the Earthling," for that is what "Adam" means, com- ing as it does from the same root as Adamah, "Earth." But the term is also a play on words, specifically dam, which means "blood" and reflects, as we shall soon see, the manner in which The Adam was "manufactured."
The Sumerian term that means "Man" is LU. But its root meaning is not "human being"; it is rather "worker, servant," and as a component of animal names implied "domesticated." The Akkadian language in which the Atra Hasis text was writ- ten (and from which all Semitic languages have stemmed) applied to the newly created being the term lulu, which means, as in the Sumerian, "Man" but which conveys the notion of
162 GENESIS REVISITED
mixing. The word lulu in a more profound sense thus meant "the mixed one." This also reflected the manner in which The Adam—"Earthling" as well as "He of the blood"—-was cre- ated.
Numerous texts in varying states of preservation or frag- mentation have been found inscribed on Mesopotamian clay tablets. In sequels to The 12th Planet the creation "myths" of other peoples, from both the Old and New Worlds, have been reviewed; they all record a process involving the mixing of a godly element with an earthly one. As often as not, the godly element is described as an "essence" derived from a god's blood, and the earthly element as "clay" or "mud." There can be no doubt that they all attempt to tell the same tale, for they all speak of a First Couple. There is no doubt that their origin is Sumerian, in whose texts we find the most elaborate descriptions and the greatest amount of detail concerning the wonderful deed: the mixing of the "divine" genes of the An- unnaki with the "earthly" genes of Apeman by fertilizing the egg of an Apewoman.
It was fertilization in vitro—in glass tubes, as depicted in this rendering on a cylinder seal (Fig. 51). And, as I have been saying since modern science and medicine achieved the feat of in vitro fertilization, Adam was the first test-tube baby. . . .
Figure 51
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 163
There is reason to believe that when Enki made the surprising suggestion to create a Primitive Worker through genetic ma- nipulation, he had already concluded that the feat was possible. His suggestion to call in Ninti for the task was also not a spur- of-the-moment idea.
Laying the groundwork for ensuing events, the Atra Hasis text begins the story of Man on Earth with the assignment of tasks among the leading Anunnaki. When the rivalry between the two half brothers. Enlil and Enki, reached dangerous levels, Anu made them draw lots. As a result, Enlil was given mastery over the old settlements and operations in the E.DIN (the bib- lical Eden) and Enki was sent to Africa, to supervise the AB. ZU, the land of mines. Great scientist that he was, Enki was bound to have spent some of his time studying the flora and fauna of his surroundings as well as the fossils that, some 300,000 years later, the Leakeys and other paleontologists have been uncovering in southeastern Africa. As scientists do today, Enki, too, must have contemplated the course of evolution on Earth. As reflected in the Sumerian texts, he came to the con- clusion that the same "seed of life" that Nibiru had brought with it from its previous celestial abode had given rise to life on both planets; much earlier on Nibiru, and later on Earth, once the latter had been seeded by the collision.
The being that surely fascinated him most was Apeman— a step above the the other primates, a hominid already walking erect and using sharpened stones as tools, a proto-Man—but not yet a fully evolved human. And Enki must have toyed with the intriguing challenge of "playing God" and conducting experiments in genetic manipulation.
To aid his experiments he asked Ninti to come to Africa and be by his side. The official reason was plausible. She was the chief medical officer; her name meant "Lady Life" (later on she was nicknamed Mammi, the source of the universal Mamma/Mother). There was certainly a need for medical ser- vices, considering the harsh conditions under which the miners toiled. But there was more to it: from the very beginning, Enlil and Enki vied for her sexual favors, for both needed a male heir by a half sister, which she was. The three of them were children of Anu, the ruler of Nibiru, but not of the same mother; and according to the succession rules of the Anunnaki (later
164 GENESIS REVISITED
adopted by the Sumerians and reflected in the biblical tales of the Patriarchs), it was not necessarily the Firstborn son but a son bom by a half sister from the same royal line who became the Legal Heir. Sumerian texts describe torrid lovemaking be- tween Enki and Ninti (with unsuccessful results, though: the offspring were all females); there was thus more than an interest in science that led to Enki's suggestion to call in Ninti and assign the task to her.
Knowing all this, we should not be surprised to read in the creation texts that, first, Ninti said she could not do it alone, that she had to have the advice and help of Enki; and second, that she had to attempt the task in the Abzu, where the right materials and facilities were available. Indeed, the two must have conducted experiments together there long before the suggestion was made at the assembly of the Anunnaki to ''let us make an Adamu in our image." Some ancient depictions show "Bull-Men" accompanied by naked Ape-men (Fig. 52) or Bird-Men (Fig. 53). Sphinxes (bulls or lions with human heads) that adorned many ancient temples may have been more than imaginary representations; and when Berossus, the Ba- bylonian priest, wrote down Sumerian cosmogony and tales of creation for the Greeks, he described a prehuman period when
Figure 52
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 165
Figure 53
"men appeared with two wings," or "one body and two heads," or with mixed male and female organs, or "some with the legs and horns of goats" or other hominid-animal mixtures. That these creatures were not freaks of nature but the result of deliberate experiments by Enki and Ninti is obvious from the Sumerian texts. The texts describe how the two came up with a being who had neither male nor female organs, a man who could not hold back his urine, a woman incapable of bearing children, and creatures with numerous other defects. Finally, with a touch of mischief in her challenging announce- ment, Ninti is recorded to have said:
How good or bad is man's body? As my heart prompts me,
I can make its fate good or bad.
Having reached this stage, where genetic manipulation was sufficiently perfected to enable the determination of the re- sulting body's good or bad aspects, the two felt they could master the final challenge: to mix the genes of hominids. Ape- men, not with those of other Earth creatures but with the genes of the Anunnaki themselves. Using all the knowledge they had amassed, the two Elohim set out to manipulate and speed up the process of Evolution. Modern Man would have undoubt-
166 GENESIS REVISITED
edly eventually evolved on Earth in any case, just as he had done on Nibim, both having come from the same "seed of life." But there was still a long way and a long time to go from the stage hominids were at 300,000 years ago to the level of development the Anunnaki had reached at that time. If, in the course of 4 billion years, the evolutionary process had been earlier on Nibiru just 1 percent of that time, Evolution would have been forty million years ahead on Nibiru compared with the course of evolution on Earth. Did the Anunnaki jump the gun on evolution on our planet by a million or two million years? No one can say for sure how long it would have taken Homo sapiens to evolve naturally on Earth from the earlier hominids, but surely forty million years would have been more than enough time.
Called upon to perform the task of "fashioning servants for the gods"—"to bring to pass a great work of wisdom." in the words of the ancient texts—Enki gave Ninti the following instructions:
Mix to a core the clay
from the Basement of the Earth,
just above the Abzu,
and shape it into the form of a core.
I shall provide good, knowing young Anunnaki who will bring the clay to the right condition.
In The 12th Planet, I analyzed the etymology of the Sumerian and Akkadian terms that are usually translated "clay" or "mud" and showed that they evolved from the Sumerian TI.IT, literally, "that which is with life," and then assumed the derivative meanings of "clay" and "mud," as well as "egg." The earthly element in the procedure for "binding upon" a being who already existed "the image of the gods" was thus to be the female egg of that being—of an Apewoman.
All the texts dealing with this event make it clear that Ninti relied on Enki to provide the earthly element, this egg of a female Apewoman, from the Abzu, from southeast Africa. Indeed, the specific location is given in the above quote: not exactly the same site as the mines (an area identified in The 12th Planet as Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) but a place
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 167
"above" it, farther north. This area was, indeed, as recent finds have shown, where Homo sapiens emerged. . . .
The task of obtaining the "divine" elements was Ninti's. Two extracts were needed from one of the Anunnaki, and a young "god" was carefully selected for the purpose. Enki's instructions to Ninti were to obtain the god's blood and shiru, and through immersions in a "purifying bath" obtain their "essences." What had to be obtained from the blood was termed TE.E.MA, at best translated "personality," a term that expresses the sense of the word: that which makes a person what he is and different from any other person. But the trans- lation "personality" does not convey the scientific precision of the term, which in the original Sumerian meant "That which houses that which binds the memory." Nowadays we call it a "gene."
The other element for which the young Anunnaki was se- lected, shiru, is commonly translated "flesh." In time, the word did acquire the meaning "flesh" among its various con- notations. But in the earlier Sumerian it referred to the sex or reproductive organs; its root had the basic meaning "to bind," "that which binds." The extract from the shiru was referred to in other texts dealing with non-Anunnaki offspring of the "gods" as kisru; coming from the male's member, it meant "semen," the male's sperm.
These two divine extracts were to be mixed well by Ninti in a purifying bath, and it is certain that the epithet lulu ("The mixed one") for the resulting Primitive Worker stemmed from this mixing process. In modern terms we would call him a hybrid.
All these procedures had to be performed under strict sanitary conditions. One text even mentions how Ninti first washed her hands before she touched the "clay." The place where these procedures were carried out was a special structure called in Akkadian Bit Shimti, which, coming from the Sumerian SHI.1M.TI literally meant "house where the wind of life is breathed in"—the source, no doubt, of the biblical assertion that after having fashioned the Adam from the clay, Elohim "blew in his nostrils the breath of life." The biblical term, sometimes translated "soul" rather than "breath of life," is Nephesh. The identical term appears in the Akkadian account
168 GENESIS REVISITED
of what took place in the "house where the wind of life is hreathed in" after the purifying and extracting procedures were completed:
The god who purifies the napishtu, Enki,
spoke up.
Seated before her [Ninti] he was prompting her. After she had recited her incantation,
she put her hand to the clay.
A depiction on a cylinder seal (Fig. 54) may well have illustrated the ancient text. It shows Enki seated, "prompting" Ninti (who is identified by her symbol, the umbilical cord), with the "test-tube" flasks behind her.
The mixing of the "clay" with all the component extracts and "essences" was not yet the end of the procedure. The egg of the Apewoman, fertilized in the "purifying baths" with the sperm and genes of the young Anunnaki "god," was then deposited in a "mold," where the "binding" was to be com- pleted. Since this part of the process is described again later in connection with the determining of the sex of the engineered being, one may surmise that was the purpose of the ' 'binding'' phase.
The length of time the fertilized egg thus processed stayed
Figure 54
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 169
in the "mold" is not stated, but what was to be done with it was quite clear. The fertilized and "molded" egg was to be reimplanted in a female womb—but not in that of its original Apewoman. Rather, it was to be implanted in the womb of a "goddess," an Anunnaki female! Only thus, it becomes clear, was the end result achievable.
Could the experimenters, Enki and Ninti, now be sure that, after all their trial-and-error attempts to create hybrids, they would then obtain a perfect lulu by implanting the fertilized and processed egg in one of their own females—that what she would give birth to would not be a monster and that her own life would not be at risk?
Evidently they could not be absolutely sure; and as often happens with scientists who use themselves as guinea pigs for a dangerous first experiment calling for a human volunteer, Enki announced to the gathered Anunnaki that his own spouse, Ninki ("Lady of the Earth") had volunteered for the task. "Ninki, my goddess-spouse," he announced, "will be the one for labor"; she was to be the one to determine the fate of the new being:
The newborn's fate thou shalt pronounce; Ninki would fix upon it the image of the gods; And what it will be is "Man."
The female Anunnaki chosen to serve as Birth Goddesses if the experiment succeeded, Enki said, should stay and observe what was happening. It was not, the texts reveal, a simple and smooth birth-giving process:
The birth goddesses were kept together. Ninti sat, counting the months.
The fateful tenth month was approaching, The tenth month arrived--
the period of opening the womb had elapsed.
The drama of Man's creation, it appears, was compounded by a late birth; medical intervention was called for. Realizing what had to be done, Ninti "covered her head" and, with an instrument whose description was damaged on the clay tablet,
170 GENESIS REVISITED
"made an opening." This done, "that which was in the womb came forth." Grabbing the newborn baby, she was overcome with joy. Lifting it up for all to see (as depicted in Fig. 51), she shouted triumphantly:
I have created!
My hands have made it!
The first Adam was brought forth.
The successful birth of The Adam—by himself, as the first biblical version states—confirmed the validity of the process and opened the way for the continuation of the endeavor. Now, enough "mixed clay" was prepared to start pregnancies in fourteen birth goddesses at a time:
Ninti nipped off fourteen pieces of clay, Seven she deposited on the right, Seven she deposited on the left; Between them she placed the mold.
Now the procedures were genetically engineered to come up with seven males and seven females at a time. We read on another tablet that Enki and Ninti,
The wise and learned,
Double-seven birth-goddesses had assembled. Seven brought forth males,
Seven brought forth females;
The birth-goddesses brought forth
the Wind of the Breath of Life.
There is thus no conflict among the Bible's various versions of Man's creation. First, The Adam was created by himself; but then, in the next phase, the Elohim indeed created the first humans "male and female."
How many times the "mass production" of Primitive Work- ers was repeated is not stated in the creation texts. We read elsewhere that the Anunnaki kept clamoring for more, and that eventually Anunnaki from the Edin—Mesopotamia—came to the Abzu in Africa and forcefully captured a large number of
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 171
Primitive Workers to take over the manual work back in Mes- opotamia. We also learn that in time, tiring of the constant need for Birth Goddesses, Enki engaged in a second genetic manipulation to enable the hybrid people to procreate on their own; but the story of that development belongs in the next chapter.
Bearing in mind that these ancient texts come to us across a bridge of time extending back for millennia, one must admire the ancient scribes who recorded, copied, and translated the earliest texts-—as often as not, probably, without really know- ing what this or that expression or technical term originally meant but always adhering tenaciously to the traditions that required a most meticulous and precise rendition of the copied texts.
Fortunately, as we enter the last decade of the twentieth century of the Common Era, we have the benefit of modern science on our side. The "mechanics" of cell replication and human reproduction, the function and code of the genes, the cause of many inherited defects and illnesses—all these and so many more biological processes are now understood; per- haps not yet completely but enough to allow us to evaluate the ancient tale and its data.
With all this modern knowledge at our disposal, what is the verdict on that ancient information? Is it an impossible fantasy, or are the procedures and processes, described with such at- tention to terminology, corroborated by modern science?
The answer is yes, it is all the way we would do it today— the way we have been following, indeed, in recent years.
We know today that to have someone or something ' 'brought forth" in the "image" and "after the likeness" of an existing being (be it a tree, a mouse, a man) the new being must have the genes of its creator; otherwise, a totally different being would emerge. Until a few decades ago all that science was aware of was that there are sets of chromosomes lurking within every living cell that impart both the physical and mental/ emotional characteristics to offspring. But now we know that the chromosomes are just stems on which long strands of DNA are positioned. With only four nucleotides at its disposal, the DNA can be sequenced in endless combinations, in short or
172 GENESIS REVISITED
long stretches interspersed with chemical signals that can mean "stop" or "go" instructions (or, it seems, to do nothing at all anymore). Enzymes are produced and act as chemical busy- bodies, launching chemical processes, sending off RNAs to do their job, creating proteins to build body and muscles, produce the myriad differentiated cells of a living creature, trigger the immune system, and, of course, help the being procreate by bringing forth offspring in its own image and after its likeness.
The beginnings of genetics are now credited to Gregor Jo- hann Mendel, an Austrian monk who, experimenting with plant hybridization, described the hereditary traits of common peas in a study published in 1866. A kind of genetic engineering has of course been practiced in horticulture (the cultivation of flowers, vegetables, and fruits) through the procedure called grafting, where the part of the plant whose qualities are desired to be added to those of another plant is added via an incision to the recipient plant. Grafting has also been tried in recent years in the animal kingdom, but with limited success between donor and recipient due to rejection by the recipient's immune system.
The next advance, which for a while received great publicity, was the procedure called Cloning. Because each cell—let us say a human cell—contains all the genetic data necessary to reproduce that human, it has the potential forgiving rise, within a female egg, to the birth of a being identical to its parent. In theory, cloning offers a
Foreword 1
- 1 The Host of Heaven 3
- 2 It Came from Outer Space 23
- 3 In the Beginning 40
- 4 The Messengers of Genesis 62
- 5 Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 89
- 6 Witness to Genesis 108
- 7 The Seed of Life 133
- 8 The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 157
- 9 The Mother Called Eve 183
- 10 When Wisdom Was Lowered from Heaven 203
- 11 A Space Base on Mars 228
- 12 Phobos: Malfunction or Star Wars 268
- 13 In Secret Anticipation 296
Index 331
FOREWORD
The last decades of the twentieth century have witnessed an upsurge of human knowledge that boggles the mind. Our ad- vances in every field of science and technology are no longer measured in centuries or even decades but in years and even months, and they seem to surpass in attainments and scope anything that Man has achieved in the past.
But is it possible that Mankind has come out of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; reached the Age of Enlightenment; experienced the Industrial Revolution; and entered the era of high-tech, genetic engineering, and space flight—only to catch up with ancient knowledge?
For many generations the Bible and its teachings have served as an anchor for a searching Mankind, but modern science appeared to have cast us ail adrift, especially in the confron- tation between Evolution and Creationism. In this volume it will be shown that the conflict is baseless; that the Book of Genesis and its sources reflect the highest levels of scientific knowledge.
Is it possible, then, that what our civilization is discovering today about our planet Earth and about our corner of the uni- verse, the heavens, is only a drama that can be called "Genesis Revisited"—only a rediscovery of what had been known to a much earlier civilization, on Earth and on another planet?
The question is not one of mere scientific curiosity; it goes to the core of Mankind's existence, its origin, and its destiny. It involves the Earth's future as a viable planet because it concerns events in Earth's past; it deals with where we are going because it reveals where we have come from. And the answers, as we shall see, lead to inevitable conclusions that some consider too incredible to accept and others too awesome to face.
1
The Host of Heaven
In the beginning
God created the Heaven and the Earth.
The very concept of a beginning of all things is basic to modern astronomy and astrophysics. The statement that there was a void and chaos before there was order conforms to the very latest theories that chaos, not permanent stability, rules the universe. And then there is the statement about the bolt of light that began the process of creation.
Was this a reference to the Big Bang, the theory according to which the universe was created from a primordial explosion, a burst of energy in the form of light, that sent the matter from which stars and planets and rocks and human beings are formed flying in all directions and creating the wonders we see in the heavens and on Earth? Some scientists, inspired by the insights of our most inspiring source, have thought so. But then, how did ancient Man know the Big Bang theory so long ago? Or was this biblical tale the description of matters closer to home, of how our own little planet Earth and the heavenly zone called the Firmament, or "hammered-out bracelet," were formed?
Indeed, how did ancient Man come to have a cosmogony at all? How much did he really know, and how did he know it?
It is only appropriate that we begin the quest for answers where the events began to unfold—in the heavens; where also, from time immemorial, Man has felt that his origins, higher values—God, if you will—are to be found. As thrilling as discoveries made by the use of microscopes are, it is what telescopes enable us to see that fills us with the realization of the grandeur of nature and the universe. Of all recent advances, the most impressive have undoubtedly been the discoveries in the heavens surrounding our planet. And what staggering ad-
3
4 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure I
vances they have been! In a mere few decades we Earthlings have soared off the face of our planet; roamed Earth's skies hundreds of miles above its surface; landed on its solitary satellite, the Moon; and sent an array of unmanned spacecraft to probe our celestial neighbors, discovering vibrant and active worlds dazzling in their colors, features, makeup, satellites, rings. For the first time, perhaps, we can grasp the meaning and feel the scope of the Psalmist's words:
The heavens bespeak the glory of the Lord and the vault of heaven reveals His handiwork.
A fantastic era of planetary exploration came to a magnificent climax when, in August 1989, the unmanned spacecraft des- ignated Voyager 2 flew by distant Neptune and sent back to Earth pictures and other data. Weighing just about a ton but ingeniously packed with television cameras, sensing and meas- uring equipment, a power source based on nuclear decay, trans- mitting antennas, and tiny computers (Fig. 1), it sent back whisperlike pulses that required more than four hours to reach Earth even at the speed of light. On Earth the pulses were captured by an array of radiotelescopes that form the Deep Space Network of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); then the faint signals were translated by electronic wizardry into photographs, charts, and other forms of data at the sophisticated facilities of the Jet Propulsion
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Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which managed the project for NASA.
Launched in August 1977, twelve years before this final mission—the visit to Neptune—was accomplished. Voyager 2 and its companion. Voyager I, were originally intended to reach and scan only Jupiter and Saturn and augment data ob- tained earlier about those two gaseous giants by the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 unmanned spacecraft. But with remarkable ingenuity and skill, the JPL scientists and technicians took advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets and, using the gravitational forces of these planets as "slingshots," man- aged to thrust Voyager 2 first from Saturn to Uranus and then from Uranus to Neptune (Fig. 2).
Figure 2
Thus it was that for several days at the end of August 1989, headlines concerning another world pushed aside the usual news of armed conflicts, political upheavals, sports results, and market reports that make up Mankind's daily fare. For a few days the world we call Earth took time out to watch another world; we, Earthlings, were glued to our television sets, thrilled by closeup pictures of another planet, the one we call Neptune.
6 GENESIS REVISITED
As the dazzling images of an aquamarine globe appeared on our television screens, the commentators stressed repeatedly that this was the first time that Man on Earth had ever really been able to see this planet, which even with the best Earth- based telescopes is visible only as a dimly lit spot in the dark- ness of space almost three billion miles from us. They reminded the viewers that Neptune was discovered only in 1846, after perturbations in the orbit of the somewhat nearer planet Uranus indicated the existence of another celestial body beyond it. They reminded us that no one before that—neither Sir Isaac Newton nor Johannes Kepler, who between them discovered and laid down the laws of celestial motion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; neither Copernicus, who in the six- teenth century determined that the Sun, not the Earth, was in the center of our planetary system, nor Galileo, who a century later used a telescope to announce that Jupiter had four moons—no great astronomer until the mid-nineteenth century and certainly no one in earlier times knew of Neptune. And thus not only the average TV viewer but the astronomers them- selves were about to see what had been unseen before—it would be the first time we would learn the true hues and makeup of Neptune.
But two months before the August encounter, I had written an article for a number of U. S., European, and South American monthlies contradicting these long-held notions: Neptune was known in antiquity, I wrote; and the discoveries that were about to be made would only confirm ancient knowledge. Neptune, I predicted, would be blue-green, watery, and have patches the color of "swamplike vegetation"!
The electronic signals from Voyager 2 confirmed all that and more. They revealed a beautiful blue-green, aquamarine planet embraced by an atmosphere of helium, hydrogen, and methane gases, swept by swirling, high-velocity winds that make Earth's hurricanes look timid. Below this atmosphere there appear mysterious giant "smudges" whose coloration is sometimes darker blue and sometimes greenish yellow, perhaps depending on the angle at which sunlight strikes them. As expected, the atmospheric and surface temperatures are below freezing, but unexpectedly Neptune was found to emit heat that emanates from within the planet. Contrary to the previous
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consideration of Neptune as being a "gaseous" planet, it was determined by Voyager 2 to have a rocky core above which there floats, in the words of the JPL scientists, "a slurry mixture of water ice." This watery layer, circling the rocky core as the planet revolves in its sixteen-hour day, acts as a dynamo that creates a sizable magnetic field.
This beautiful planet (see Neptune, back cover) was found to be encircled by several rings made up of boulders, rocks, and dust and is orbited by at least eight satellites, or moons. Of the latter, the largest, Triton, proved no less spectacular than its planetary master. Voyager 2 confirmed the retrograde mo- tion of this small celestial body (almost the size of Earth's Moon): it orbits Neptune in a direction opposite to that of the coursing of Neptune and all other known planets in our Solar System, not anticlockwise as they do but clockwise. Besides its very existence, its approximate size, and its retrograde mo- tion, astronomers knew nothing else of Triton. Voyager 2 re- vealed it to be a "blue moon," an appearance resulting from methane in Triton's atmosphere. The surface of Triton showed through the thin atmosphere—a pinkish gray surface with rug- ged, mountainous features on one side and smooth, almost craterless features on the other side. Close-up pictures sug- gested recent volcanic activity but of a very odd kind: what the active, hot interior of this celestial body spews out is not molten lava but jets of slushy ice. Even preliminary assess- ments indicated that Triton had flowing water in its past, quite possibly even lakes that may have existed on the surface until relatively recent times, in geological terms. The astronomers had no immediate explanation for "double-tracked ridge lines" that run straight for hundreds of miles and, at one or even two points, intersect at what appears to be right angles, suggesting rectangular areas (Fig. 3).
The discoveries thus fully confirmed my prediction: Neptune is indeed blue-green; it is made up in great part of water; and it does have patches whose coloration looks like "swamplike vegetation." This last tantalizing aspect may bespeak more than a color code if the full implication of the discoveries on Triton is taken into consideration: there, "darker patches with brighter halos" have suggested to the scientists of NASA the existence of "deep pools of organic sludge." Bob Davis re-
8 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 3
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ported from Pasadena to The Wall Street Journal that Triton, whose atmosphere contains as much nitrogen as Earth's, may be spewing out from its active volcanoes not only gases and water ice but also '"organic material, carbon-based compounds which apparently coat parts of Triton."
Such gratifying and overwhelming corroboration of my pre- diction was not the result of a mere lucky guess. It goes back to 1976 when The 12th Planet, my first book in The Earth Chronicles series, was published. Basing my conclusions on millennia-old Sumerian texts, I had asked rhetorically: "When we probe Neptune someday, will we discover that its persistent association with waters is due to the watery swamps" that had once been seen there?
This was published, and obviously written, a year before Voyager 2 was even launched and was restated by me in an article two months before the Neptune encounter.
How could I be so sure, on the eve of Voyager's encounter with Neptune, that my 1976 prediction would be corrobo- rated—how dared I take the chance that my predictions would be disproved within weeks after submitting my article? My certainty was based on what happened in January 1986, when Voyager 2 flew by the planet Uranus.
Although somewhat closer to us—Uranus is "only" about two billion miles away—it lies so far beyond Saturn that it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It was discovered in 1781 by Frederick Wilhelm Herschel, a musician turned amateur astronomer, only after the telescope was perfected. At the time of its discovery and to this day, Uranus has been hailed as the first planet w/iknown in antiquity to be discovered in modern times; for, it has been held, the ancient peoples knew of and venerated the Sun, the Moon, and only five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which they be- lieved moved around the Earth in the "vault of heaven"; noth- ing could be seen or known beyond Saturn.
But the very evidence gathered by Voyager 2 at Uranus proved the opposite: that at one time a certain ancient people did know about Uranus, and about Neptune, and even about the more-distant Pluto!
Scientists are still analyzing the photographs and data from Uranus and its amazing moons, seeking answers to endless
10 GENESIS REVISITED
Plate A
puzzles. Why does Uranus lie on its side, as though it was hit by another large celestial object in a collision? Why do its winds blow in a retrograde direction, contrary to what is normal in the Solar System? Why is its temperature on the side that is hidden from the Sun the same as on the side facing the Sun? And what shaped the unusual features and formations on some of the Uranian moons? Especially intriguing is the moon called Miranda, "one of the most enigmatic objects in the Solar Sys-
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Figure 4
tern," in the words of NASA's astronomers, where an elevated, flattened-out plateau is delineated by 100-mile-long escarp- ments that form a right angle (a feature nicknamed "the Chev- ron" by the astronomers), and where, on both sides of this plateau, there appear elliptical features that look like racetracks ploughed over by concentric furrows (Plate A and Fig. 4).
Two phenomena, however, stand out as the major discov- eries regarding Uranus, distinguishing it from other planets. One is its color. With the aid of Earth-based telescopes and unmanned spacecraft we have become familiar with the gray- brown of Mercury, the sulphur-colored haze that envelops Ve- nus, the reddish Mars, the multihued red-brown-yellow Jupiter and Saturn. But as the breathtaking images of Uranus began
12 GENESIS REVISITED
to appear on television screens in January 1986, its most striking feature was its greenish blue color—a color totally different from that of all the previous planets seen (see Uranus, back cover).
The other different and unexpected finding had to do with what Uranus is made of. Defying earlier assumptions by astron- omers that Uranus is a totally "gaseous" planet like the giants Jupiter and Saturn, it was found by Voyager 2 to be covered not by gases but by water; not just a sheet of frozen ice on its surface but an ocean of water. A gaseous atmosphere, it was found, in- deed enshrouds the planet; but below it there churns an immense layer—6,000 miles thick!—of "super-heated water, its tempera- ture as high as 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit" (in the words of JPL analysts). This layer of liquid, hot water surrounds a molten rocky core where radioactive elements (or other, unknown pro- cesses) produce the immense internal heat.
As the images of Uranus grew bigger on the TV screen the closer Voyager 2 neared the planet, the moderator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory drew attention to its unusual green-blue color. I could not help cry out loud, ' 'Oh, my God, it is exactly as the Sumerians had described it!" I hurried to my study, picked up a copy of The 12th Planet, and with unsteady hands looked up page 269 (in the Avon paperback edition). I read again and again the lines quoting the ancient texts. Yes, there was no doubt: though they had no telescopes, the Sumerians had described Uranus as MASH.SIG, a term which I had trans- lated "bright greenish."
A few days later came the results of the analysis of Voyager 2's data, and the Sumerian reference to water on Uranus was also corroborated. Indeed, there appeared to be water all over the place: as reported on a wrap-up program on the television series NOVA ('The Planet That Got Knocked on Its Side"), "Voyager 2 found that all the moons of Uranus are made up of rock and ordinary water ice" This abundance, or even the mere presence, of water on the supposed "gaseous" planets and their satellites at the edges of the Solar System was totally unexpected.
Yet here we had the evidence, presented in The 12th Planet, that in their texts from millennia ago the ancient Sumerians had not only known of the existence of Uranus but had ac- curately described it as greenish blue and watery!
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What did all that mean? It meant that in 1986 modern science did not discover what had been unknown; rather, it rediscov- ered and caught up with ancient knowledge. It was, therefore, because of that 1986 corroboration of my 1976 writings and thus of the veracity of the Sumerian texts that I felt confident enough to predict, on the eve of the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune, what it would discover there.
The Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune had thus con- firmed not only ancient knowledge regarding the very existence of these two outer planets but also crucial details regarding them. The 1989 flyby of Neptune provided still more corrob- oration of the ancient texts. In them, Neptune was listed before Uranus, as would be expected of someone who is coming into the Solar System and sees first Pluto, then Neptune, and then Uranus. In these texts or planetary lists Uranus was called Kakkab shanamma, "Planet Which Is the Double'' of Neptune.
The Voyager 2 data goes far to uphold this ancient notion. Uranus is indeed a look-alike of Neptune in size, color, and watery content; both planets are encircled by rings and orbited by a multitude of satellites, or moons. An unexpected similarity has been found regarding the two planets' magnetic fields: both have an unusually extreme inclination relative to the planets' axes of rotation—58 degrees on Uranus, 50 degrees on Nep- tune. "Neptune appears to be almost a magnetic twin of Ura- nus," John Noble Wilford reported in The New York Times. The two planets are also similar in the lengths of their days: each about sixteen to seventeen hours long.
The ferocious winds on Neptune and the water ice slurry layer on its surface attest to the great internal heat it generates, like that of Uranus. In fact, the reports from JPL state that initial temperature readings indicated that "Neptune's tem- peratures are similar to those of Uranus, which is more than a billion miles closer to the Sun." Therefore, the scientists assumed "that Neptune somehow is generating more of its internal heat than Uranus does"—somehow compensating for its greater distance from the Sun to attain the same temperatures as Uranus generates, resulting in similar temperatures on both planets—and thus adding one more feature "to the size and other characteristics that make Uranus a near twin of Neptune.''
"Planet which is the double," the Sumerians said of Uranus in comparing it to Neptune. "Size and other characteristics
14 GENESIS REVISITED
that make Uranus a near twin of Neptune," NASA's scientists announced. Not only the described characteristics but even the terminology—"planet which is the double," "a near twin of Neptune"—is similar. But one statement, the Sumerian one, was made circa 4,000 B.C., and the other, by NASA, in A D . 1989, nearly 6,000 years later. . . .
In the case of these two distant planets, it seems that modern science has only caught up with ancient knowledge. It sounds incredible, but the facts ought to speak for themselves. More- over, this is just the first of a series of scientific discoveries in the years since The 12th Planet was published that corroborate its findings in one instance after another.
Those who have read my books (The Stairway to Heaven, The Wars of Gods and Men, and The Lost Realms followed the first one) know that they are based, first and foremost, on the knowledge bequeathed to us by the Sumerians.
Theirs was the first known civilization. Appearing suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere some 6,000 years ago, it is credited with virtually all the "firsts" of a high civilization: inventions and innovations, concepts and beliefs, which form the foundation of our own Western culture and indeed of all other civilizations and cultures throughout the Earth. The wheel and animal-drawn vehicles, boats for rivers and ships for seas, the kiln and the brick, high-rise buildings, writing and schools and scribes, laws and judges and juries, kingship and citizens' councils, music and dance and art, medicine and chemistry, weaving and textiles, religion and priesthoods and temples— they all began there, in Sumer, a country in the southern part of today's Iraq, located in ancient Mesopotamia. Above all, knowledge of mathematics and astronomy began there.
Indeed, all the basic elements of modern astronomy are of Sumerian origin: the concept of a celestial sphere, of a horizon and a zenith, of the circle's division into 360 degrees, of a celestial band in which the planets orbit the Sun, of grouping stars into constellations and giving them the names and pictorial images that we call the zodiac, of applying the number 12 to this zodiac and to the divisions of time, and of devising a calendar that has been the basis of calendars to this very day. All that and much, much more began in Sumer.
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Figure 5
The Sumerians recorded their commercial and legal trans- actions, their tales and their histories, on clay tablets (Fig. 5a); they drew their illustrations on cylinder seals on which the depiction was carved in reverse, as a negative, that appeared as a positive when the seal was rolled on wet clay (Fig. 5b). In the ruins of Sumerian cities excavated by archaeologists in the past century and a half, hundreds, if not thousands, of the texts and illustrations that were found dealt with astronomy. Among them are lists of stars and constellations in their correct heavenly locations and manuals for observing the rising and setting of stars and planets. There are texts specifically dealing with the Solar System. There are texts among the unearthed tablets that list the planets orbiting the Sun in their correct order; one text even gives the distances between the planets. And there are illustrations on cylinder seals depicting the Solar System, as the one shown in Plate B that is at least 4,500 years old and that is now kept in the Near Eastern Section of the State Museum in East Berlin, catalogued under number V A/243.
If we sketch the illustration appearing in the upper left-hand comer of the Sumerian depiction (Fig. 6a) we see a complete Solar System in which the Sun (not Earth!) is in the center,
16 GENESIS REVISITED
Plate B
orbited by all the planets we know of today. This becomes clear when we draw these known planets around the Sun in their correct relative sizes and order (Fig. 6b). The similarity between the ancient depiction and the current one is striking; it leaves no doubt that the twinlike Uranus and Neptune were known in antiquity.
The Sumerian depiction also reveals, however, some dif- ferences. These are not artist's errors or misinformation; on the contrary, the differences—two of them—are very signif- icant.
The first difference concerns Pluto. It has a very odd orbit— too inclined to the common plane (called the Ecliptic) in which the planets orbit the Sun, and so elliptical that Pluto sometimes (as at present and until 1999) finds itself not farther but closer to the Sun than Neptune. Astronomers have therefore specu- lated, ever since its discovery in 1930, that Pluto was originally a satellite of another planet; the usual assumption is that it was a moon of Neptune that "somehow"—no one can figure out how—got torn away from its attachment to Neptune and at- tained its independent (though bizarre) orbit around the Sun.
This is confirmed by the ancient depiction, but with a sig- nificant difference. In the Sumerian depiction Pluto is shown not near Neptune but between Saturn and Uranus. And Su- merian cosmological texts, with which we shall deal at length, relate that Pluto was a satellite of Saturn that was let loose to
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Figure 6
eventually attain its own "destiny"—its independent orbit around the Sun.
The ancient explanation regarding the origin of Pluto reveals not just factual knowledge but also great sophistication in mat- ters celestial. It involves an understanding of the complex forces that have shaped the Solar System, as well as the de-
18 GENESIS REVISITED
velopment of astrophysical theories by which moons can be- come planets or planets in the making can fail and remain moons. Pluto, according to Sumerian cosmogony, made it; our Moon, which was in the process of becoming an independent planet, was prevented by celestial events from attaining the independent status.
Modern astronomers moved from speculation to the convic- tion that such a process has indeed occurred in our Solar System only after observations by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft determined in the past decade that Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, was a planet-in-the-making whose detachment from Saturn was not completed. The discoveries at Neptune rein- forced the opposite speculation regarding Triton, Neptune's moon that is just 400 miles smaller in diameter than Earth's Moon. Its peculiar orbit, its volcanism, and other unexpected features have suggested to the JPL scientists, in the words of the Voyager project's chief scientist Edward Stone, that "Tri- ton may have been an object sailing through the Solar System several billion years ago when it strayed too close to Neptune, came under its gravitational influence and started orbiting the planet."
How far is this hypothesis from the Sumerian notion that planetary moons could become planets, shift celestial positions, or fail to attain independent orbits? Indeed, as we continue to expound the Sumerian cosmogony, it will become evident that not only is much of modern discovery merely a rediscovery of ancient knowledge but that ancient knowledge offered expla- nations for many phenomena that modern science has yet to figure out.
Even at the outset, before the rest of the evidence in support of this statement is presented, the question inevitably arises: How on Earth could the Sumerians have known all that so long ago, at the dawn of civilization?
The answer lies in the second difference between the Su- merian depiction of the Solar System (Fig. 6a) and our present knowledge of it (Fig. 6b). It is the inclusion of a large planet in the empty space between Mars and Jupiter. We are not aware of any such planet; but the Sumerian cosmological, astronom- ical, and historical texts insist that there indeed exists one more planet in our Solar System—its twelfth member: they included
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the Sun, the Moon (which they counted as a celestial body in its own right for reasons stated in the texts), and ten, not nine, planets. It was the realization that a planet the Sumerian texts called NIBIRU ("Planet of the Crossing") was neither Mars nor Jupiter, as some scholars have debated, but another planet that passes between them every 3,600 years that gave rise to my first book's title, The 12th Planet—the planet which is the "twelfth member" of the Solar System (although technically it is, as a planet, only the tenth).
It was from that planet, the Sumerian texts repeatedly and persistently stated, that the ANUNNAKI came to Earth. The term literally means "Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came." They are spoken of in the Bible as the Anakim, and in Chapter 6 of Genesis are also called Nefilim, which in He- brew means the same thing: Those Who Have Come Down, from the Heavens to Earth.
And it was from the Anunnaki, the Sumerians explained— as though they had anticipated our questions—that they had learnt all they knew. The advanced knowledge we find in Sumerian texts is thus, in effect, knowledge that was possessed by the Anunnaki who had come from Nibiru; and theirs must have been a very advanced civilization, because as I have surmised from the Sumerian texts, the Anunnaki came to Earth about 445,000 years ago. Way back then they could already travel in space. Their vast elliptical orbit made a loop—this is the exact translation of the Sumerian term—around all the outer planets, acting as a moving observatory from which the Anunnaki could investigate all those planets. No wonder that what we are discovering now was already known in Sumerian times.
Why anyone would bother to come to this speck of matter we call Earth, not by accident, not by chance, not once but repeatedly, every 3,600 years, is a question the Sumerian texts have answered. On their planet Nibiru, the Anunnaki/Nefilim were facing a situation we on Earth may also soon face: eco- logical deterioration was making life increasingly impossible. There was a need to protect their dwindling atmosphere, and the only solution seemed to be to suspend gold particles above it, as a shield. (Windows on American spacecraft, for example, are coated with a thin layer of gold to shield the astronauts
20 GENESIS REVISITED
from radiation). This rare metal had been discovered by the Anunnaki on what they called the Seventh Planet (counting from the outside inward), and they launched Mission Earth to obtain it. At first they tried to obtain it effortlessly, from the waters of the Persian Gulf; but when that failed, they embarked on toilsome mining operations in southeastern Africa.
Some 300,000 years ago, the Anunnaki assigned to the Af- rican mines mutinied. It was then that the chief scientist and the chief medical officer of the Anunnaki used genetic manip- ulation and in-vitro fertilization techniques to create "primitive workers"—the first Homo sapiens to take over the backbreak- ing toil in the gold mines.
The Sumerian texts that describe all these events and their condensed version in the Book of Genesis have been exten- sively dealt with in The 12th Planet. The scientific aspects of those developments and of the techniques employed by the Anunnaki are the subject of this book. Modern science, it will be shown, is blazing an amazing track of scientific advances— but the road to the future is replete with signposts, knowledge, and advances from the past. The Anunnaki, it will be shown, have been there before; and as the relationship between them and the beings they had created changed, as they decided to give Mankind civilization, they imparted to us some of their knowledge and the ability to make our own scientific advances.
Among the scientific advances that will be discussed in the ensuing chapters will also be the mounting evidence for the existence of Nibiru. If it were not for The 12th Planet, the discovery of Nibiru would be a great event in astronomy but no more significant for our daily lives than, say, the discovery in 1930 of Pluto. It was nice to learn that the Solar System has one more planet "out there," and it would be equally gratifying to confirm that the planetary count is not nine but ten; that would especially please astrologers, who need twelve celestial bodies and not just eleven for the twelve houses of the zodiac.
But after the publication of The 12th Planet and the evidence therein—which has not been refuted since its first printing in 1976—and the evidence provided by scientific advances since then, the discovery of Nibiru cannot remain just a matter in- volving textbooks on astronomy. If what I have written is so--
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if, in other words, the Sumerians were correct in what they were recording—the discovery of Nibiru would mean not only that there is one more planet out there but that there is Life out there. Moreover, it would confirm that there are intelligent beings out there—people who were so advanced that, almost half a million years ago, they could travel in space; people who were coming and going between their planet and Earth every 3,600 years.
It is who is out there on Nibiru, and not just its existence, that is bound to shake existing political, religious, social, eco- nomic, and military orders on Earth. What will the repercus- sions be when—not if—Nibiru is found?
It is a question, believe it or not, that is already being pon- dered.
22
GENESIS REVISITED
GOLD MINING—HOW LONG AGO?
Is there evidence that mining took place, in southern Africa, during the Old Stone Age? Archaeological studies indicate that it indeed was so.
Realizing that sites of abandoned ancient mines may in- dicate where gold could be found, South Africa's leading mining corporation, the Anglo-American Corporation, in the 1970s engaged archaeologists to look for such ancient mines. Published reports (in the corporation's journal Op- tima) detail the discovery in Swaziland and other sites in South Africa of extensive mining areas with shafts to depths of fifty feet. Stone objects and charcoal remains established dates of 35,000, 46,000, and 60,000 B.C. for these sites. The archaeologists and anthropologists who joined in dating the finds believed that mining technology was used in south- ern Africa "during much of the period subsequent to 100,000 B.C."
In September 1988, a team of international physicists came to South Africa to verify the age of human habitats in Swaziland and Zululand. The most modern techniques indicated an age of 80,000 to 115,000 years.
Regarding the most ancient gold mines of Monotapa in southern Zimbabwe, Zulu legends hold that they were worked by "artificially produced flesh and blood slaves created by the First People." These slaves, the Zulu legends recount, "went into battle with the Ape-Man" when "the great war star appeared in the sky" (see Indaba My Chil- dren, by the Zulu medicine man Credo Vusamazulu Mu- twa).
2
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
"It was Voyager [project] that focused our attention on the importance of collisions," acknowledged Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the chief scientist of the Voyager program. "The cosmic crashes were potent sculptors of the Solar System."
The Sumerians made clear, 6,000 years earlier, the very same fact. Central to their cosmogony, world view, and religion was a cataclysmic event that they called the Celestial Battle. It was an event to which references were made in miscellaneous Sumerian texts, hymns, and proverbs—just as we find in the Bible's books of Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and various others. But the Sumerians also described the event in detail, step by step, in a long text that required seven tablets. Of its Sumerian original only fragments and quotations have been found; the mostly complete text has reached us in the Akkadian language, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians who followed the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. The text deals with the for- mation of the Solar System prior to the Celestial Battle and even more so with the nature, causes, and results of that awe- some collision. And, with a single cosmogonic premise, it explains puzzles that still baffle our astronomers and astro- physicists.
Even more important, whenever these modern scientists have come upon a satisfactory answer—it fits and corroborates the Sumerian one!
Until the Voyager discoveries, the prevailing scientific view- point considered the Solar System as we see it today as the way it had taken shape soon after its beginning, formed by immutable laws of celestial motion and the force of gravity. There have been oddballs, to be sure—meteorites that come from somewhere and collide with the stable members of the
23
24 GENESIS REVISITED
Solar System, pockmarking them with craters, and comets that zoom about in greatly elongated orbits, appearing from some- where and disappearing, it seems, to nowhere. But these ex- amples of cosmic debris, it has been assumed, go back to the very beginning of the Solar System, some 4.5 billion years ago, and are pieces of planetary matter that failed to be in- corporated into the planets or their moons and rings. A little more baffling has been the asteroid belt, a band of rocks that forms an orbiting chain between Mars and Jupiter. According to Bode's law, an empirical rule that explains why the planets formed where they did, there should have been a planet, at least twice the size of Earth, between Mars and Jupiter. Is the orbiting debris of the asteroid belt the remains of such a planet? The affirmative answer is plagued by two problems: the total amount of matter in the asteroid belt does not add up to the mass of such a planet, and there is no plausible explanation for what might have caused the breakup of such a hypothetical
Figure 7
It Came from Outer Space 25
planet; if a celestial collision—when, with what, and why? The scientists had no answer.
The realization that there had to be one or more major col- lisions that changed the Solar System from its initial form became inescapable after the Uranus flyby in 1986, as Dr. Stone has admitted. That Uranus was lilted on its side was already known from telescopic and other instrumental obser- vations even before the Voyager encounter. But was it formed that way from the very beginning, or did some external force— a forceful collision or encounter with another major celestial body—bring about the tilting?
The answer had to be provided by the closeup examination of the moons of Uranus by Voyager 2. The fact that these moons swirl around the equator of Uranus in its tilted posi- tion—forming, all together, a kind of bull's-eye facing the Sun (Fig. 7)—made scientists wonder whether these moons were there at the time of the tilting event, or whether they formed after the event, perhaps from matter thrown out by the force of the collision that tilted Uranus.
The theoretical basis for the answer was enunciated, prior to the encounter with Uranus, among others by Dr. Christian Veillet of the French Centre d'Etudes et des Recherches Geo- dynamiques. If the moons formed at the same time as Uranus, the celestial "raw material" from which they agglomerated should have condensed the heavier matter nearer the planet; there should be more of heavier, rocky material and thinner ice coats on the inner moons and a lighter combination of materials (more water ice, less rocks) on the outer moons. By the same principle of the distribution of material in the Solar System—a larger proportion of heavier matter nearer the Sun, more of the lighter matter (in a "gaseous" state) farther out— the moons of the more distant Uranus should be proportionately lighter than those of the nearer Saturn.
But the findings revealed a situation contrary to these ex- pectations. In the comprehensive summary reports on the Ura- nus encounter, published in Science, July 4, 1986, a team of forty scientists concluded that the densities of the Uranus moons (except for that of the moon Miranda)' 'are significantly heavier than those of the icy satellites of Saturn." Likewise, the Voyager 2 data showed—again contrary to what "should
26 GENESIS REVISITED
have been"—that the two larger inner moons of Uranus, Ariel and Umbriel, are lighter in composition (thick, icy layers; small, rocky cores) than the outer moons Titania and Oberon, which were discovered to be made mostly of heavy rocky material and had only thin coats of ice.
These findings by Voyager 2 were not the only clues sug- gesting that the moons of Uranus were not formed at the same time as the planet itself but rather some lime later, in unusual circumstances. Another discovery that puzzled the scientists was that the rings of Uranus were pitch-black, "blacker than coal dust," presumably composed of "carbon-rich material, a sort of primordial tar scavenged from outer space" (the em- phasis is mine). These dark rings, warped, tilted, and "bi- zarrely elliptical," were quite unlike the symmetrical bracelets of icy particles circling Saturn. Pitch-black also were six of the new moonlets discovered at Uranus, some acting as "shep- herds" for the rings. The obvious conclusion was that the rings and moonlets were formed from the debris of a "violent event in Uranus's past." Assistant project scientist at JPL Ellis Miner stated it in simpler words: "A likely possibility is that an interloper from outside the Uranus system came in and struck a once larger moon sufficiently hard to have fractured it."
The theory of a catastrophic celestial collision as the event that could explain all the odd phenomena on Uranus and its moons and rings was further strengthened by the discovery that the boulder-size black debris that forms the Uranus rings circles the planet once every eight hours—a speed that is twice the speed of the planet's own revolution around its axis. This raises the question, how was this much-higher speed imparted to the debris in the rings?
Based on all the preceding data, the probability of a celestial collision emerged as the only plausible answer. "We must take into account the strong possibility that satellite formation con- ditions were affected by the event that created Uranus's large obliquity," the forty-strong team of scientists stated. In simpler words, it means that in all probability the moons in question were created as a result of the collision that knocked Uranus on its side. In press conferences the NASA scientists were more audacious. "A collision with something the size of Earth, traveling at about 40,000 miles per hour, could have done it,"
II Came from Outer Space 27
they said, speculating that it probably happened about four billion years ago.
Astronomer Garry Hunt of the Imperial College, London, summed it up in seven words: "Uranus took an almighty bang early on."
But neither in the verbal briefings nor in the long written reports was an attempt made to suggest what the "something" was, where it had come from, and how it happened to collide with, or bang into, Uranus.
For those answers, we will have to go back to the Sumer- ians... .
Before we turn from knowledge acquired in the late 1970s and 1980s to what was known 6,000 years earlier, one more aspect of the puzzle should be looked into: Are the oddities at Neptune the result of collisions, or ' 'bangs,'' unrelated to those of Uranus—or were they all the result of a single catastrophic event that affected all the outer planets?
Before the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune, the planet was known to have only two satellites, Nereid and Triton. Nereid was found to have a peculiar orbit: it was unusually tilted compared with the planet's equatorial plane (as much as 28 degrees) and was very eccentric—orbiting the planet not in a near-circular path but in a very elongated one, which takes the moon as far as six million miles from Neptune and as close as one million miles to the planet. Nereid, although of a size that by planetary-formation rules should be spherical, has an odd shape like that of a twisted doughnut. It also is bright on one side and pitch-black on the other. All these peculiarities have led Martha W. Schaefer and Bradley E. Schaefer, in a major study on the subject published in Nature magazine (June 2, 1987) to conclude that "Nereid accreted into a moon around Neptune or another planet and that both it and Triton were knocked into their peculiar orbits by some large body or planet." "Imagine," Brad Schaefer noted, "that at one time Neptune had an ordinary satellite system like that of Jupiter or Saturn; then some massive body comes into the system and perturbs things a lot."
The dark material that shows up on one side of Nereid could be explained in one of two ways—but both require a collision
28 GENESIS REVISITED
in the scenario. Either an impact on one side of the satellite swept off an existing darker layer there, uncovering lighter material below the surface, or the dark matter belonged to the impacting body and "went splat on one side of Nereid." That the latter possibility is the more plausible is suggested by the discovery, announced by the JPL team on August 29, 1989, that all the new satellites (six more) found by Voyager 2 at Neptune "are very dark" and "all have irregular shapes," even the moon designated 1989N1, whose size normally would have made it spherical.
The theories regarding Triton and its elongated and retro- grade (clockwise) orbit around Neptune also call for a collision event.
Writing in the highly prestigious magazine Science on the eve of the Voyager 2 encounter with Neptune, a team of Caltech scientists (P. Goldberg, N. Murray. P. Y. Longaretti, and D. Banfield) postulated that "Triton was captured from a heli- ocentric orbit"—from an orbit around the Sun—"as a result of a collision with what was then one of Neptune's regular satellites." In this scenario the original small Neptune satellite "would have been devoured by Triton," but the force of the collision would have been such that it dissipated enough of Triton's orbital energy to slow it down and be captured by Neptune's gravity. Another theory, according to which Triton was an original satellite of Neptune, was shown by this study to be faulty and unable to withstand critical analysis.
The data collected by Voyager 2 from the actual flyby of Triton supported this theoretical conclusion. It also was in accord with other studies (as by David Stevenson of Caltech) that showed that Triton's internal heat and surface features could be explained only in terms of a collision in which Triton was captured into orbit around Neptune.
"Where did these impacting bodies come from?" rhetori- cally asked Gene Shoemaker, one of NASA's scientists, on the NOVA television program. But the question was left with- out an answer. Unanswered too was the question of whether the cataclysms at Uranus and Neptune were aspects of a single event or were unconnected incidents.
It is not ironic but gratifying to find that the answers to all these puzzles were provided by the ancient Sumerian texts.
It Came from Outer Space 29
and that all the data discovered or confirmed by the Voyager flights uphold and corroborate the Sumerian information and my presentation and interpretation thereof in The 12th Planet. The Sumerian texts speak of a single but comprehensive event. Their texts explain more than what modern astronomers have been trying to explain regarding the outer planets. The ancient texts also explain matters closer to home, such as the origin of the Earth and its Moon, of the Asteroid Belt and the comets. The texts then go on to relate a tale that combines the credo of the Creationists with the theory of Evolution, a tale that offers a more successful explanation than either mod- ern conception of what happened on Earth and how Man and his civilization came about.
It all began, the Sumerian texts relate, when the Solar System was still young. The Sun (APSU in the Sumerian texts, mean- ing "One Who Exists from the Beginning"), its little com- panion MUM. MU ('' One Who Was Born,'' our Mercury) and farther away TI.AMAT ("Maiden of Life") were the first members of the Solar System; it gradually expanded by the "birth" of three planetary pairs, the planets we call Venus and Mars between Mummu and Tiamat, the giant pair Jupiter and Saturn (to use their modern names) beyond Tiamat, and Uranus and Neptune farther out (Fig. 8).
Into this original Solar System, still unstable soon after its formation (I estimated the time about four billion years ago), an Invader appeared. The Sumerians called it NIBIRU; the Babylonians renamed it Marduk in honor of their national god. It appeared from outer space, from "the Deep," in the words of the ancient text. But as it approached the outer planets of our Solar System, it began to be drawn into it. As expected, the first outer planet to attract Nibiru with its gravitational pull was Neptune—E.A ("He Whose House Is Water") in Su- merian. "He who begot him was Ea," the ancient text ex- plained.
Nibiru/Marduk itself was a sight to behold; alluring, spar- kling, lofty, lordly are some of the adjectives used to describe it. Sparks and flashes bolted from it to Neptune and Uranus as it passed near them. It might have arrived with its own satellites already orbiting it, or it might have acquired some as a result
30 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 8
of the gravitational pull of the outer planets. The ancient text speaks of its "perfect members. . .difficult to perceive"— "four were his eyes, four were his ears."
As it passed near Ea/Neptune, Nibiru/Marduk's side be- gan to bulge "as though he had a second head." Was it then that the bulge was torn away to become Neptune's moon Tri- ton? One aspect thai speaks strongly for this is the fact that Nibiru/Marduk entered the Solar System in a retrograde (clock- wise) orbit, counter to that of the other planets (Fig. 9). Only
It Came from Outer Space 31
Figure 9
this Sumerian detail, according to which the invading planet was moving counter to the orbital motion of all the other planets, can explain the retrograde motion of Triton, the highly elliptical orbits of other satellites and comets, and the other major events that we have yet to tackle.
More satellites were created as Nibiru/Marduk passed by Anu/Uranus. Describing this passing of Uranus, the text states that "Anu brought forth and begot the four winds"—as clear a reference as one could hope for to the four major moons of Uranus that were formed, we now know, only during the col- lision that tilted Uranus. At the same time we learn from a later passage in the ancient text that Nibiru/Marduk himself gained three satellites as a result of this encounter.
Although the Sumerian texts describe how, after its eventual capture into solar orbit, Nibiru/Marduk revisited the outer planets and eventually shaped them into the system as we know it today, the very first encounter already explains the various puzzles that modern astronomy faced or still faces regarding Neptune, Uranus, their moons, and their rings.
Past Neptune and Uranus, Nibiru/Marduk was drawn even more into the midst of the planetary system as it reached the immense gravitational pulls of Saturn (AN.SHAR, "Foremost of the Heavens") and Jupiter (KI.SHAR, "Foremost of the Firm Lands"). As Nibiru/Marduk "approached and stood as
32 GENESIS REVISITED
though in combat" near Anshar/Saturn, the two planets "kissed their lips." It was then that the "destiny," the orbital path, of Nibiru/Marduk was changed forever. It was also then that the chief satellite of Saturn, GA.GA (the eventual Pluto), was pulled away in the direction of Mars and Venus—a di- rection possible only by the retrograde force of Nibiru/Marduk. Making a vast elliptical orbit, Gaga eventually returned to the outermost reaches of the Solar System. There it "addressed" Neptune and Uranus as it passed their orbits on the swing back. It was the beginning of the process by which Gaga was to become our Pluto, with its inclined and peculiar orbit that sometimes takes it between Neptune and Uranus.
The new "destiny," or orbital path, of Nibiru/Marduk was now irrevocably set toward the olden planet Tiamat. At that time, relatively early in the formation of the Solar System, it was marked by instability, especially (we learn from the text) in the region of Tiamat. While other planets nearby were still wobbling in their orbits, Tiamat was pulled in many directions by the two giants beyond her and the two smaller planets between her and the Sun. One result was the tearing off her, or the gathering around her, of a "host" of satellites "furious with rage," in the poetic language of the text (named by schol- ars the Epic of Creation). These satellites, "roaring monsters," were "clothed with terror" and "crowned with halos," swirl- ing furiously about and orbiting as though they were "celestial gods"—planets.
Most dangerous to the stability or safety of the other planets was Tiamat's "leader of the host," a large satellite that grew to almost planetary size and was about to attain its independent "destiny"—its own orbit around the Sun. Tiamat "cast a spell for him, to sit among the celestial gods she exalted him." It was called in Sumerian KIN.GU—"Great Emissary."
Now the text raised the curtain on the unfolding drama; I have recounted it, step by step, in The 12th Planet. As in a Greek tragedy, the ensuing "celestial battle" was unavoidable as gravitational and magnetic forces came inexorably into play, leading to the collision between the oncoming Nibiru/Marduk with its seven satellites ("winds" in the ancient text) and Tiamat and its "host" of eleven satellites headed by Kingu.
Although they were headed on a collision course, Tiamat orbiting counterclockwise and Nibiru/Marduk clockwise, the
It Came from Outer Space 33
Figure 10
two planets did not collide—a fact of cardinal astronomical importance. It was the satellites, or "winds," (literal Sumerian meaning: "Those that are by the side") of Nibiru/Marduk that smashed into Tiatnat and collided with her satellites.
In the first such encounter (Fig. 10), the first phase of the Celestial Battle,
The four winds he stationed
that nothing of her could escape:
The South Wind, the North Wind,
the East Wind, the West Wind.
Close to his side he held the net,
the gift of his grandfather Anu who brought forth the Evil Wind, the Whirlwind and the Hurricane. . . .
34 GENESIS REVISITED
He sent forth the winds which he had created, the seven of them; to trouble Tiamat within they rose up behind him.
These "winds," or satellites, of Nibiru/Marduk, "the seven of them," were the principal "weapons" with which Tiamat was attacked in the first phase of the Celestial Battle (Fig. 10). But the invading planet had other "weapons" too:
In front of him he set the lightning,
with a blazing flame he filled his body;
He then made a net to enfold Tiamat therein. . . .
A fearsome halo his head was turbaned.
He was wrapped with awesome terror as with a cloak.
As the two planets and their hosts of satellites came close enough for Nibiru/Marduk to "scan the inside of Tiamat" and ' 'perceive the scheme of Kingu,'' Nibiru/ Marduk attacked Tia- mat with his "net" (magnetic field?) to "enfold her," shooting at the old planet immense bolts of electricity ("divine light- nings"). Tiamat "was filled with brilliance"—slowing down, heating up, "becoming distended." Wide gaps opened in its crust, perhaps emitting steam and volcanic matter. Into one widening fissure Nibiru/Marduk thrust one of its main satel- lites, the one called "Evil Wind." It tore Tiamat's "belly, cut through her insides, splitting her heart."
Besides splitting up Tiamat and "extinguishing her life," the first encounter sealed the fate of the moonlets orbiting her— all except the planetlike Kingu. Caught in the "net"—the magnetic and gravitational pull—of Nibiru/Marduk, "shat- tered, broken up," the members of the "band of Tiamat" were thrown off their previous course and forced into new orbital paths in the opposite direction: "Trembling with fear, they turned their backs about."
Thus were the comets created—thus, we learn from a 6,000- year-old text, did the comets obtain their greatly elliptical and retrograde orbits. As to Kingu, Tiamat's principal satellite, the text informs us that in that first phase of the celestial collision Kingu was just deprived of its almost-independent orbit. Nibiru/Marduk took away from him his "destiny." Ni- biru/Marduk made Kingu into a DUG.GA.E, "a mass of life-
It Came from Outer Space 35
less clay," devoid of atmosphere, waters and radioactive matter and shrunken in size; and "with fetters bound him," to remain in orbit around the battered Tiamal.
Having vanquished Tiamat, Nibiru/Marduk sailed on on his new "destiny." The Sumerian text leaves no doubt that the erstwhile invader orbited the Sun:
He crossed the heavens and surveyed the regions, and Apsu's quarter he measured;
The Lord the dimensions of the Apsu measured.
Having circled the Sun (Apsu), Nibiru/Marduk continued into distant space. But now, caught forever in solar orbit, it had to turn back. On his return round, Ea/Neptune was there to greet him and Anshar/Saturn hailed his victory. Then his new orbital path returned him to the scene of the Celestial Battle, "turned back to Tiamat whom he had bound."
The Lord paused to view her lifeless body. To divide the monster he then artfully planned. Then, as a mussel, he split her into two parts.
With this act the creation of "the heaven" reached its final stage, and the creation of Earth and its Moon began. First the new impacts broke Tiamat into two halves. The upper part, her "skull," was struck by the Nibiru/Marduk satellite called North Wind; the blow carried it, and with it Kingu, "to places that have been unknown"—to a brand-new orbit where there had not been a planet before. The Earth and our Moon were created (Fig. 11)!
The other half of Tiamat was smashed by the impacts into bits and pieces. This lower half, her "tail," was "hammered together" to become a "bracelet" in the heavens:
Locking the pieces together,
as watchmen he stationed them. . . .
He bent Tiamat's tail to form the Great Band as a bracelet.
Thus was "the Great Band," the Asteroid Belt, created. Having disposed of Tiamat and Kingu, Nibiru/Marduk once
36 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure II
again "crossed the heavens and surveyed the regions." This time his attention was focused on the "Dwelling of Ea" (Nep- tune), giving that planet and its twinlike Uranus their final makeup. Nibiru/Marduk also, according to the ancient text, provided Gaga/Pluto with its final "destiny," assigning to it "a hidden place"—a hitherto unknown part of the heavens. It was farther out than Neptune's location; it was, we are told, "in the Deep"—far out in space. In line with its new position as the outermost planet, it was granted a new name: US.MI— "He Who Shows the Way," the first planet encountered com- ing into the Solar System—that is, from outer space toward the Sun.
Thus was Pluto created and put into the orbit it now holds. Having thus "constructed the stations" for the planets, Ni-
It Came from Outer Space 37
Figure 12
Figure 13
38 GENESIS REVISITED
biru/Marduk made two "abodes" for itself. One was in the "Firmament," as the asteroid belt was also called in the ancient texts; the other far out "in the Deep" was called the "Great/Distant Abode," alias E.SHARRA ("Abode/Home of the Ruler/Prince"). Modern astronomers call these two pla- netary positions the perigee (the orbital point nearest the Sun) and the apogee (the farthest one) (Fig. 12). It is an orbit, as concluded from the evidence amassed in The 12th Planet, that takes 3,600 Earth-years to complete.
Thus did the Invader that came from outer space become the twelfth member of the Solar System, a system made up of the Sun in the center, with its longtime companion Mercury; the three olden pairs (Venus and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune); the Earth and the Moon, the remains of the great Tiamat, though in a new position; the newly inde- pendent Pluto; and the planet that put it all into final shape, Nibiru/Marduk (Fig. 13).
Modern astronomy and recent discoveries uphold and cor- roborate this millennia-old tale.
It Came from Outer Space 39
WHEN EARTH HAD NOT BEEN FORMED
In 1766 J. D. Titius proposed and in 1772 Johann Elert Bode popularized what became known as "Bode's law," which showed that planetary distances follow, more or less, the pro- gression 0, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc., if the formula is manipulated by multiplying by 3, adding 4, and dividing by 10. Using as a measure the astronomical unit (AU), which is the distance of Earth from the Sun, the formula indicates that there should be a planet between Mars and Jupiter (the asteroids are found there) and a planet beyond Saturn (Uranus was discovered). The formula shows tolerable deviations up until one reaches Uranus but gets out of whack from Neptune on.
Planet Distance
Mercury 0.387 Venus 0.723 Earth 1.000 Mars 1.524 Asteroids 2.794 Jupiter 5.203 Saturn 9.539 Uranus 19.182 Neptune 30.058 Pluto 39.400
Bode 's Law Distance Deviation
0.400 3.4% 0.700 3.2% 1.000
1.600 5.0% 2.800
5.200
Mercury Venus Earth Mars Asteroids Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto
0.387 0.723 1.000 1.524 2.794 5.203 9.539 19.182 30.058 39.400
0.400 3.4% 0.700 3.2% 1.000
1.600 5.0% 2.800
5.200
10.000 4.8% 19.600 2.1% 38.800 36.3% 77.200 95.9%
(AU)
Planet
Distance ______ (AU)
10.000 4.8% 19.600 2.1% 38.800 36.3% 77.200 95.9%
Bode's Law Distance Deviation
Bode's law, which was arrived at empirically, thus uses Earth as its arithmetic starting point. But according to the Sumerian cosmogony, at the beginning there was Tiamat between Mars and Jupiter, whereas Earth had not yet formed.
Dr. Amnon Sitchin has pointed out that if Bode's law is stripped of its arithmetical devices and only the geometric progression is retained, the formula works just as well if Earth is omitted—thus confirming Sumerian cosmogony:
Planet Distance from Ratio of _____ ______________ Sun (miles) Increase
36,250,000 — 67,200,000 1.85 141,700,000 2.10
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Asteroids (Ti.Amat)260,400,000 1.84
Jupiter Saturn Uranus
484,000,000 1.86
887,100,000 1.83 1.783,900,000 2.01
3
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 as 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 cal- culated 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 chro- nology 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 Crea- tionists and Evolutionists—a totally unwarranted demarcation, as the evidence herewith presented will show—are undoubt- edly more sharply etched by the principle of the separation between religion and state that is embodied in the U.S. Con- stitution. But such a separation is not the norm among the
40
In the Beginning 41
Earth's nations (even in enlightened democracies such as En- gland), 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 religion and a national god, the temples were the seat of scientific knowledge, and the priests were the savants. This was so because when civilization began, the gods who were worshipped—the focus of the act of being "reli- gious"—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 coun- terpart. By renaming Nibiru "Marduk" in the Babylonian ver- sions of the creation story, the Babylonians usurped for Marduk the attributes of a supreme "God of Heaven and Earth." This version—the most intact one found so far—is known as Enuma elish ("When in the heights"), taken from its opening words. It became the most hallowed religious-political-scientific document of the land; it was read as a central part of the New Year rituals, and players reenacted the tale in passion plays to bring its import home to the masses. The clay tablets (Fig. 14) on which they were written were prized possessions of temples and royal libraries in antiquity.
The decipherment of the writing on the clay tablets discov- ered 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 com- piled. Especially important were texts found in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (a city of biblical renown); they recorded a tale of creation that matches, in some parts word for word, the tale of Genesis. George Smith of the British Museum pieced together the broken tablets that held the creation texts and published, in 1876, The Chaldean Gen- esis, it conclusively established that there indeed existed an Akkadian text of the Genesis tale, written in the Old Babylonian dialect, that preceded the biblical text by at least a thousand years. Excavations between 1902 and 1914 uncovered tablets
42 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 14
with the Assyrian version of the creation epic, in which the name of Ashur, the Assyrian national god, was substituted for that of the Babylonian Marduk. Subsequent discoveries estab- lished not only the extent of the copying and translation, in antiquity, of this epic text, but also its unmistakable Sumerian origin.
It was L. W. King who, in 1902, in his work The Seven Tablets of Creation, showed that the various fragments add up to seven tablets; six of them relate the creation process; the seventh tablet is entirely devoted to the exaltation of "the Lord" — Marduk in the Babylonian version, Ashur in the As-
In the Beginning 43
syrian one. One can only guess that this seven-tablet division somehow is the basis of the division of the biblical story into a seven-part timetable, of which six parts involve divine han- diwork and the seventh is devoted to a restful and satisfactory look back at what had been achieved.
It is true that the Book of Genesis, written in Hebrew, uses the term yom, commonly meaning and translated as "day," to denote each phase. Once, as a guest on a radio talk show in a "Bible Belt" city, I was challenged by a woman who called in about this very point. I explained that by "day" the Bible does not mean our term of twenty-four hours on Earth but rather conveys the concept of a phase in the process of creation. No, she insisted, that is exactly what the Bible means: twenty-four hours. I then pointed out to her that the text of the first chapter of Genesis deals not with a human timetable but with that of the Creator, and we are told in the Book of Psalms (90:4) that in God's eyes "a thousand years are like yester- day." Would she concede, at least, that Creation might have taken six thousand years? I asked. To my disappointment, there was no concession. Six days means six days, she insisted.
Is the biblical tale of creation a religious document, its con- tents 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 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 Su- merian 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, resplendent in his precious garments (Fig. 15), he was wor- shipped as Ilu (translated "god" but literally meaning "the Lofty One"); his struggle to gain supremacy over the other Anunnaki gods has been detailed in my book The Wars of Gods and Men. On the other hand, "Marduk" was a celestial deity.
44 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 15
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 sym- bolic depiction was that of a winged disc (Fig. 16). The As- syrians, replacing Marduk with their national god Ashur, combined the two aspects and depicted Ashur as a god within the winged disc (Fig. 17).
The Hebrews followed suit but, preaching monotheism and recognizing—based on Sumerian scientific knowledge—the universality of God, ingeniously solved the problem of duality and of the multitude of Anunnaki deities involved in the events on Earth by concocting a singular-but-plural entity, not an El (the Hebrew equivalent of Ilu) but Elohim—a Creator who is plural (literally "Gods") and yet One. This departure from the Babylonian and Assyrian religious viewpoint can be explained only by a realization that the Hebrews 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, ev-
In the Beginning 45
46 GENESIS REVISITED
crlasting, and omnipresent God—Elohim—-in whose grand de- sign for the universe the path of 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.
These profound perceptions, which lie at the core of the biblical adoption of the creation story, Enuma elish, could be arrived at only by bringing together religion and science while retaining, in the narrative and sequence of events, the scientific basis.
But to recognize this—that Genesis represents not just re- ligion but also science—one must recognize the role of the Anunnaki and accept that the Sumerian texts are not "myth" but factual reports. Scholars have made much progress in this respect, but they have not yet arrived at a total recognition of the factual nature of the texts. Although both scientists and theologians are by now well aware of the Mesopotamian origin of Genesis, they remain stubborn in brushing off the scientific value of these ancient texts. It cannot be science, they hold, because "it should be obvious by the nature of things that none of these stories can possibly be the product of human memory'' (to quote N. M. Sama of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Understanding Genesis). Such a statement can be challenged only by explaining, as I have repeatedly done in my writings, that the information of 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"1 how the Solar System was created or how Nibiru/Marduk invaded the Solar System, be- cause they themselves were not yet 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 cre- ation; 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."
In the Beginning 47
Several updated studies of the Enumu elish, such as The Babylonian Genesis by Alexander Heidel of the Oriental In- stitute, University of Chicago, have dwelt on the parallels in theme and structure between the Mesopotamian and biblical narratives. Both indeed begin with the statement that the tale takes its reader (or listener, as in Babylon) to the primordial time when the Earth and "the heavens" did not yet exist. But whereas the Sumerian cosmogony dealt with the creation of the Solar System and only then set the stage for the appearance of the celestial Lord (Nibiru/Marduk), the biblical version skipped all that and went directly to the Celestial Battle and its aftermath.
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 the traditional King James version, the biblical open- ing is more matter-of-fact, not an inspirational religious opus but a lesson in primordial science, informing the reader that there indeed was a time when Heaven and the Earth did not yet exist, and that it took an act of the Celestial Lord, his "spirit" moving upon the "waters." to bring Heaven and Earth about with a bolt of light.
The progress in biblical and linguistic studies since the time of King James has moved the editors of both the Catholic The New American Bible and The New English Bible of the churches in Great Britain to substitute the word "wind"—which is what the Hebrew ru'ach means—for the "Spirit of God," so that the last verse now reads "a mighty wind swept over the waters." They retain, however, the concept of "abyss" for the Hebrew word Tehom in the original Bible; but by now even theologians acknowledge that the reference is to no other entity than the Sumerian Tiamat.
48 GENESIS REVISITED
With this understanding, the reference in the Mesopotamian version to the mingling "waters" of Tiamat ceases to be al- legorical and calls for a factual evaluation. It goes to the ques- tion of the plentiful waters of Earth and the biblical assertion (correct, as we shall soon 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 watery!
The watery nature of Tehom/Tiamat is mentioned in various biblical references. The prophet Isaiah (51:10) recalled "the primeval days" when the might of the Lord "carved the Haughty One, made spin the watery monster, drained off the waters of the mighty Tehom." The psalmist extolled the Lord of Beginnings who "by thy might the waters thou didst disperse, the leader of the watery monsters thou didst break up."
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 flashes 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.
The continuing narrative of Genesis does not describe the ensuing splitting up of Tiamat or the breakup of her host of satellites, described so vividly in the Mesopotamian texts. It is evident, however, from the above-quoted verses from Isaiah and Psalms, as well as from the narrative in Job (26:7-13), that the Hebrews were familiar with the skipped-over portions of the original tale. Job recalled how the celestial Lord smote "the helpers of the Haughty One," and he exalted the Lord
In the Beginning 49
who, having come from the outer reaches of space, cleaved Tiamat (Tehom) and changed the Solar System:
The hammered canopy He stretched out in the place of Tehom,
The Earth suspended in the void;
He penned waters in its denseness, without any cloud bursting. . . .
His powers the waters did arrest,
His energy the Haughty One did cleave.
His wind the Hammered Bracelet measured out, His hand the twisting dragon did extinguish.
The Mesopotamian texts continued from here to describe how Nibiru/Marduk formed the asteroid belt out of Tiamat's lower half:
The other half of her
he set up as a screen for the skies; Locking them together
as watchmen he stationed them. . . . He bent Tiamat's tail
to form the Great Band as a bracelet.
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."
Realizing that the Hebrew word Shama'im is used to speak of Heaven or the heavens in general, the editors of Genesis went into some length to use two terms for "the Heaven" created as a result of the destruction of Tiamat. What separated
50 GENESIS REVISITED
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 then 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.
The ancient tale is replete with details, each of which is amazing by itself. Ancient awareness of them is so incredible that its only plausible explanation is the one offered by the Sumerians themselves—namely, that those who had come to Earth from Nibiru were the source of that knowledge. Modern astronomy has already corroborated many of these details; by doing so, it indirectly confirms the key assertions of the ancient cosmogony and astronomy: the Celestial Battle that resulted in the breakup of Tiamat, the creation of Earth and the asteroid belt, and the capture of Nibiru/Marduk into permanent orbit around our Sun.
Let us look at one aspect of the ancient tale—the "host" of satellites, or "winds," that the "celestial gods" had.
We now know that Mars has two moons, Jupiter sixteen moons and several more moonlets, Saturn twenty-one or more, Uranus as many as fifteen, Neptune eight. Until Galileo dis- covered with his telescope the four brightest and largest sat- ellites of Jupiter in 1610, it was unthinkable that a celestial body could have more than one such companion-—evidence Earth and its solitary Moon.
But here we read in the Sumerian texts that as Ni- biru/Marduk's gravity interacted with that of Uranus, the In- vader "begot" three satellites ("winds") and Anu/Uranus "brought forth" four such moons. By the time Nibiru/Marduk reached Tiamat, it had a total of seven "winds" with which to attack Tiamat, and Tiamat had a "host'' of eleven—among
In the Beginning 51
them the "leader of the host," which was about to become an independently orbiting planet, our eventual Moon.
Another element of the Sumerian tale, of great significance to the ancient astronomers, was the assertion that the debris from the lower half of Tiamat was stretched out in the space where she had once existed.
The Mesopotamian texts, and the biblical version thereof in Genesis, are emphatic and detailed about the formation of the asteroid belt—insisting that such a "bracelet" of debris exists and orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. But our astron- omers were not aware of that until the nineteenth century. The first realization that the space between Mars and Jupiter was not just a dark void was the discovery by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1, 1801, of a small celestial object in the space between the two planets, an object that was named Ceres and that has the distinction of being the first known (and named) asteroid. Three more asteroids (Pallas, Juno, and Vesta) were discovered by 1807, none after that until 1845, and hundreds since then, so that almost 2,000 are known by now. Astronomers believe that there may be as many as 50,000 asteroids at least a mile in diameter, as well as many more pieces of debris, too small to be seen from Earth, which number in the billions.
In other words, 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 Firma- ment" from the "waters which are above the Firmament" remained a puzzle. What, in God's name, was the Bible talking about?
We have known, of course, that Earth was a watery planet, but it has been assumed that it is uniquely so. Many will undoubtedly recall science-fiction tales wherein aliens come to Earth to carry off its unique and life-giving liquid, water. So even if the ancient texts had in mind Tiamat's, and hence Earth's, waters, and if this was what was meant by the "water which is below the Firmament," what water was there to talk about regarding that which is "above the Firmament"?
We know—don't we?-—that the asteroid belt had, indeed, as the ancient text reported, divided the planets into two groups.
52 GENESIS REVISITED
"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 conventional wisdom was that neither group (again, excepting Earth) had any water.
Well, as a result of the missions of unmanned spacecraft to all the other planets except Pluto, we now know better. Mer- cury, which was observed by the spacecraft Mariner 10 in 1974/75, is too small and too close to the Sun to have retained water, if it ever had any. But Venus, likewise believed to be waterless because of its relative proximity to the Sun, surprised the scientists. It was discovered by unmanned spacecraft, both American and Soviet, that the extremely hot surface of the planet (almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit) was caused not so much by its proximity to the Sun as by a "greenhouse" effect: the planet is enshrouded in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and clouds that contain sulphuric acid. As a result the heat of the Sun is trapped and does not dissipate back into space during the night. This creates an ever-rising temperature that would have vaporized any water that Venus might have had. But did it ever have such water in its past?
The careful analysis of the results of unmanned probes led the scientists to answer emphatically, yes. The topographical features revealed by radar mapping suggested erstwhile oceans and seas. That such bodies of water might have indeed existed on Venus was indicated by the finding that the "hell-like at- mosphere," as some of the scientists termed it, contained traces of water vapor.
Data from two unmanned spacecraft that probed Venus for an extended period after December 1978, Pioneer-Venus I and 2, convinced the team of scientists that analyzed the findings that Venus "may once have been covered by water at an av- erage depth of thirty feet"; Venus, they concluded (Science, May 7, 1982), once had "at least 100 times as much water in liquid form as it does today in the form of vapor.'' Subsequent studies have suggested that some of that ancient water was used up in the formation of the suphuric acid clouds, while some of it gave up its oxygen to oxidize the rocky surface of the planet.
"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
In the Beginning 53
Plate C
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 state- ment.
At the end of the nineteenth century the existence of enig- matic "canals" on Mars was popularized by the telescopic observations of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the American Percival Lowell. This was generally laughed off; and the conviction prevailed that Mars was dry and barren. The first unmanned surveys of Mars, in the 1960s, seemed to confirm the notion that it was a "geologically lifeless planet, like the Moon." This notion was completely discredited when the spacecraft Mariner 9 launched in 1971, went into orbit around Mars and photographed its entire surface, not just the 10 percent or so surveyed by all the previous probes. The results, in the words of the astronomers managing the project, "were astounding." Mariner 9 revealed that volcanoes, can- yons, and dry river beds abound on Mars (Plate C). "Water has played an active role in the planet's evolution," stated Harold Masursky of the U.S. Geological Survey, who headed
54 GENESIS REVISITED
the team analyzing the photographs. "The most convincing evidence was found in the many photographs showing deep, winding channels that may have once been fast-flowing streams. . . . We are forced to no other conclusion but that we are seeing the effects of water on Mars."
The Mariner 9 findings were confirmed and augmented by the results of the Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions launched five years later; they examined Mars both from orbiters and from landers that descended to the planet's surface. They showed such features as evidence of several floodings by large quan- tities of water in an area designated Chryse Planitis; channels that once held and were formed by running water coming from the Vallis Marineris area; cyclical meltings of permafrost in the equatorial regions; rocks weathered and eroded by the force of water; and evidence of erstwhile lakes, ponds, and other "water basins."
Water vapor was found in the thin Martian atmosphere; Charles A. Barth, the principal scientist in charge of Mariner 9's ultraviolet measurements, estimated that the evaporation amounted to the equivalent of 100,000 gallons of water daily. Norman Horowitz of Caltech reasoned that "large amounts of water in some form have in past eons been introduced to the surface and into the atmosphere of Mars," because that was required in order to have so much carbon dioxide (90 percent) in the Martian atmosphere. In a report published in 1977 by the American Geographical Union (Journal of Geophysical Research, September 30, 1977) on the scientific results of the Viking project, it was concluded that "a long time ago giant flash floods carved the Martian landscape in a number of places; a volume of water equal to Lake Erie poured . . . scouring great channels."
The Viking 2 lander reported frost on the ground where it came to rest. The frost was found to consist of a combination of water, water ice, and frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice). The debate about whether the polar ice caps of Mars contain water ice or dry ice was resolved in January 1979 when JPL scientists reported at the 2nd International Colloquium on Mars, held at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, that "the north pole consists of water ice," though not so the south pole.
The final NASA report after the Viking missions (Mars: The
In the Beginning 55
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. When the planet was warmer it may have had lakes as large as Earth's Great Lakes in North America and as much as three miles deep. 'This is an almost inescapable conclu- sion," stated Michael H. Carr and Jack McCauley of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1985. At two conferences on Mars held in Washington, DC, in July 1986 under the auspices of NASA. Walter Sullivan reported in The New York Times, sci- entists expressed the belief that ' 'there is enough water hidden in the crust of Mars to theoretically flood the entire planet to an average depth of at least 1,000 feet." Arizona State Uni- versity scientists working for NASA advised Soviet scientists in charge of their country's Mars landing projects that some deep Martian canyons may still have flowing water in their depths, or at least just below the dry riverbeds.
What had started out as a dry and barren planet has emerged, in the past decade, as a planet where water was once abun- dant—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.
The ancient assertion that the asteroid belt separated the waters that were below the Firmament from those that were above it implies that there was water on the celestial bodies that are located farther out. We have already reviewed the latest discoveries of Voyager 2 that confirm the Sumerian de- scription of Uranus and Neptune as "watery." What about the other two celestial bodies that are orbiting between those two outer planets and the asteroid belt, Saturn and Jupiter?
Saturn itself, a gaseous giant whose volume is more than eight hundred times greater than that of Earth, has not yet been penetrated down to its surface—assuming it has, somewhere below its vast atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, a solid or liquid core. But its various moons as well as its breathtaking rings (Fig. 18) are now known to be made, if not wholly then in large part, of water ice and perhaps even liquid water.
56 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 18
Originally, Earth-based observations of Saturn showed only seven rings; we now know from space probes that there are many more, with thinner rings and thousands of ringlets filling the spaces between the seven major rings; all together they create the effect of a disk that, like a phonograph record, is "grooved" with rings and ringlets. The unmanned spacecraft Pioneer 11 established in 1979 that the rings and ringlets consist of icy material, believed at the time to be small pieces of ice a few inches in diameter or as small as snowflakes. 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
In the Beginning 57
sparkling ice," JPL's scientists said. The ice, at some pri- mordial time, had been liquid water.
The several larger moons of Saturn at which the three space- craft, especially Voyager 2, took a peek, appeared to have much more water, and not only in the form of ice. Pioneer 11 reported in 1979 that the group of inner moons of Saturn— Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Rhea—ap- peared to be "icy bodies . . . consisting largely of ice." Voy- ager 1 confirmed in 1980 that these inner satellites as well as the newly discovered moonlets were "spheres of ice." On Enceladus, which was examined more closely, the indications were that its smooth plains resulted from the filling in of old craters with liquid water that had oozed up to the surface and then frozen.
Voyager 1 also revealed that Saturn's outer moons were ice covered. The moon lapetus, which puzzled astronomers be- cause it showed dark and bright portions, was found to be "coated with water ice" in the bright areas. Voyager 2 con- firmed in 1981 that lapetus was "primarily a ball of ice with some rock in its center." The data, Von R. Eshleman of Stan- ford University concluded, indicated that lapetus was 55 per- cent water ice, 35 percent rock, and 10 percent frozen methane. Saturn's largest moon, Titan—larger than the planet Mer- cury—was found to have an atmosphere and a surface rich in hydrocarbons. But under them there is a mantle of frozen ice, and some sixty miles farther down, as the internal heat of this celestial body increases, there is a thick layer of water slush. Farther down, it is now believed, there probably exists a layer of bubbling hot water more than 100 miles deep. All in all, the Voyagers' data suggested that Titan is 15 percent rock and 85 percent water and ice.
Is Saturn itself a larger version of Titan, its largest moon? Future missions might provide the answer. For the time being it is clear that wherever the modern instruments could reach— moons, moonlets, and rings—there was water everywhere. Saturn did not fail to confirm the ancient assertions.
Jupiter was investigated by Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 and by the two Voyagers. The results were no different than at Saturn. The giant gaseous planet was found to emit immense amounts of radiation and heat and to be engulfed by a thick atmosphere that is subject to violent storms. Yet even this
58 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 19
impenetrable envelope was found to be constituted primarily of hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, water vapor, and probably droplets of water, somewhere farther down inside the thick atmosphere there is liquid water, the scientists have con- cluded.
As with Saturn, the moons of Jupiter proved more fasci- nating, revealing, and surprising than the planet itself. Of the four Galilean moons, Io, the closest to Jupiter (Fig. 19), re- vealed totally unexpected volcanic activity. Although what the volcanoes spew is mostly sulphur based, the erupted material contains some water. The surface of Io shows vast plains with troughs running through them, as if they had been carved by running water. The consensus is that 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
In the Beginning 59
than Io. Its surface shows a latticework of veinlike lines that suggested to the NASA teams shallow fissures in a sea of frozen ice. A close look at Europa by Voyager 2 revealed a layer of mushy water ice under the cracked surface. At the December 1984 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Fran- cisco, two scientists (David Reynolds and Steven Squyres) of NASA's Ames Research Center suggested that under Europa's ice sheet there might exist warmer oases of liquid water that could sustain living organisms. After a reexamination of Voy- ager 2 photographs, NASA scientists tentatively concluded that the spacecraft witnessed volcanic eruptions of water and am- monia from the moon's interior. The belief now is that Europa has an ice covering several miles thick "overlaying an ocean of liquid water up to thirty miles deep, kept from freezing by radioactive decay and the friction of tidal forces."
Ganymede, 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. It is thought to be made almost entirely of water ice, with an inner ocean of liquid water near its core. The fourth Galilean moon, Callisto—about the size of the planet Mercury—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. A ring discovered around Jupiter is also made mostly, it not wholly, of ice particles.
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.
60
GENESIS REVISITED
SEEING THE SUN
When we can see the Sun with the naked eye, as at dawn or at sunset, it is a perfect disk. Even when viewed with telescopes, it has the shape of a perfect globe. Yet the Sumerians depicted it as a disk with a triangular rays ex- tending from its round surface, as seen on cylinder seal VA/243 (Plate B and Fig. 6a). Why?
In 1980 astronomers of the High Altitude Observatory of the University of Colorado took pictures of the Sun with a special camera during an eclipse observed in India. The pictures revealed that because of magnetic influences, the Sun's corona gives it the appearance of a disk with triangular rays extending from its surface—just as the Sumerians had depicted millennia earlier.
In January 1983, I brought the "enigmatic representa- tion" on the Sumerian cylinder seal to the attention of the editor of Scientific American, a journal that reported the astronomers' discovery. In response, the editor, Dennis Flanagan, wrote to me on January 27, 1983:
"Thank you for your letter of January 25.
"What you have to say is most interesting, and we may well be able to publish it."
"In addition to the many puzzles posed by this depic- tion," 1 had written in my letter, "foremost of which is the source of the Sumerian knowledge, is now their apparent familiarity with the true shape of the Sun's corona."
Is it the need to acknowledge the source of Sumerian knowledge that is still holding up publication of what Sci- entific American has deemed "most interesting"?
4
THE MESSENGERS OF GENESIS
In 1986 Mankind was treated to a oncc-in-a-lifetime event: the appearance of a messenger from the past, a Messenger of Genesis. Its name was Halley's comet.
One of many comets and other small objects that roam the heavens, Halley's comet is unique in many ways; among them is the fact that its recorded appearances have been traced to millennia ago, as well as the fact that modern science was able, in 1986, to conduct for the first time a comprehensive, close- up examination of a comet and its core. The first fact under- scores the excellence of ancient astronomy; because of the second, data was obtained that—-once again—corroborated an- cient knowledge and the tales of Genesis.
The chain of scientific developments that led Edmund Hal- ley, who became British Astronomer Royal in 1720, to deter- mine, 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 con- cluded that the curve described by comets is elliptical, even- tually bringing these celestial bodies back to where they had been observed before. The "three" comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 were unusual in that they were all orbiting in the "wrong" direction—clockwise rather than counterclockwise; had similar deviations from the general orbital plane of the planets around the Sun—being inclined about 17 to 18 degrees—and were
61
62 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 20
similar in appearance. Concluding they were one and the same comet, he plotted its course and calculated its period (the length of time between its appearances) to be about seventy-six years. He then predicted that it would reappear in 1758. He did not live long enough to see his prediction come true, but he was honored by having the comet named after him.
Like that of all celestial bodies, and especially because of a comet's small size, its orbit is easily perturbed by the grav- itational pull 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; there- fore, although more precise measurements have somewhat nar- rowed the orbital range of Halley's comet from the seventy- four to seventy-nine years that he had calculated, the period of seventy-six years is only a practical average; the actual orbit and its period must be recalculated each time the comet makes an appearance.
The Messengers of Genesis 63
With the aid of modern equipment, an average of five or six comets are reported each year; of them, one or two are comets on return trips, while the others are newly discovered. 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 (Fig. 20) in a little over three years. Most short-period comets av- erage an orbital period of about seven years, which carries them to the environs of Jupiter. Typical of them is comet Giacobini-Zinner (named, like other comets, after its discov- erers), which has a period of 6 1/2 years; its latest passage within Earth's view was in 1985. On the other hand there are the very-long-period comets like comet Kohoutek, which was dis- covered in March 1973, was fully visible in December 1973 and January 1974, and then disappeared from view, perhaps to return in 75,000 years. By comparison, the cycle of 76 years for Halley's comet is short enough to remain in living mem- ories, yet long enough to retain its magic as a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event.
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 (Fig. 21). Still, the Great Comet of
Figure 21
64 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 22
1910, as it was then hailed, was awaited with great appre- hension. There was fear that Earth or life on it would not survive the anticipated passage because Earth would be envel- oped in the comet's tail of poisonous gases. There was also alarm at the prospect that, as was believed in earlier times, the appearance of the comet would be an ill omen of pestilence, wars, and the death of kings. As the comet reached its greatest magnitude and brilliance in May of 1910, its tail stretching over more than half the vault of heaven (Fig. 22), King Edward VII of Great Britain died. On the European continent, a series
The Messengers of Genesis 65
of political upheavals culminated in the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
The belief, or superstition, associating Halley's comet with wars and upheavals was fed by much that was coming to light about events that coincided with its previous appearances. The Seminole Indians' revolt against the white settlers of Florida in 1835, the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618, the Turkish siege of Belgrade in 1456, the outbreak of the Black Death (bubonic plague) in 1347—all were accompanied or preceded by the appearance of a great comet, which was finally recognized as Halley's Comet, thus establishing its role as the messenger of God's wrath.
Figure 23
Whether divinely ordained or not, the coincidence of the comet's appearance in conjunction with major historic events seems to grow the more we go back in time. One of the most celebrated appearances of a comet, definitely Halley's, is that of 1066, during the Battle of Hastings in which the Saxons, under King Harold, were defeated by William the Conqueror. The comet was depicted (Fig. 23) on the famous Bayeux tap- estry, which is thought to have been commissioned by Queen
66 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 24
Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, to illustrate his vic- tory. The inscription next to the comet's tail, Isti mirant stella, means, "They are in awe of the star," and refers to the de- piction of King Harold tottering on his throne.
The year A.D. 66 is considered by astronomers one in which Halley's comet made an appearance; they base their conclusion
The Messengers of Genesis 67
sion 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 de- struction 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 a whole year."
Until recently the earliest certain record of the observation of a comet was found in the Chinese Chronological Tables of Shih-chi for the year 467 B.C., in which the pertinent entry reads, "During the tenth year of Ch'in Li-kung a broom-star was seen." Some believe a Greek inscription refers to the same comet in that year. Modern astronomers are not sure that the 467 B.C. Shih-chi entry refers to Halley's comet; they are more confident regarding a Shih-chi entry for the year 240 B.C. (Fig. 24). 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 ap- pearance of extraordinary celestial bodies—probably comets, they 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., as none of the scholars who have been preoccupied with Halley's comet have realized, was of great significance in Jewish and Near Eastern history. It was the very year in which the Jews of Judea, under the leadership of the Maccabees, revolted against Greek-Syrian domination, recap- tured Jerusalem, and purified the defiled Temple. The Temple rededication ceremony is celebrated to this day by Jews as the festival of Hanukkah ("Rededication"). The 164 B.C. tablet (Fig. 25), numbered WA-41462 in the British Museum, is clearly dated to the relevant year in the reign of the Seleucid (Greek-Syrian) king Antiochus Epiphanes, the very evil King Antiochus of the Books of Maccabees. The unusual celestial object, which the three scholars believe was Halley's comet, 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.
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Figure 25
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 1986,1 pointed out that the Hebrew
The Messengers of Genesis 69
name for "comet" is Kokhav shavit, a "Scepler star." This has a direct bearing, I wrote, on the biblical tale of the seer Bilam. When the Israelites ended their wanderings in the desert after the Exodus and began the conquest of Canaan, the Moa- bite king summoned Bilam 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.
In The Stairway to Heaven I provided a chronology that fixed the date of the Exodus at 1433 B.C.; the Israelite entry into Canaan began forty years later, in 1393 B.C. Halley's comet, at an interval of 76 or 77 years, would have appeared circa 1390 B.C. Did Bilam consider that event as a divine signal that the Israelite advance could not and should not be stopped? 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. It is significant that in spite of the crushing defeat of the Judean revolt by the Romans in A.D. 66, the Jews took up arms again some seventy years later in a heroic effort to free Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. The leader of that revolt, Shimeon Bar Kosiba, was renamed by the religious leaders Bar Kokhba, "Son of the Star," specif- ically because of the above-quoted verses in Numbers 24.
One can only guess whether the revolt the Romans put down after three years, in A.D. 135, was also intended as was the Maccabean one, to achieve the rededication of the Temple by the time of the return of Halley's comet, in A.D. 142. The realization that we, in 1986, have seen and experienced the return of a majestic celestial body that had great historic impact in the past, should send a shudder down some spines, mine among them.
How far back does this messenger of the past go? According
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Figure 26
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 Solar System, astronomers and physicists believe, was formed out of a primordial cloud of gaseous matter; like every- thing else in the universe, it was in constant motion—circling about its galaxy (the Milky Way) and rotating around its own center of gravity. Slowly the cloud spread as it cooled; slowly the center became a star (our Sun) and the planets coalesced out of the rotating disc of gaseous matter. Thenceforth, the motion of all parts of the Solar System retained the original direction of the primordial cloud, anticlockwise. 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
The Messengers of Genesis 71
previously reviewed, was retrograde—in the opposite direc- tion, clockwise. Its effect on Pluto—which according to the Sumerian texts was GA.GA and was shifted by Nibiru to its present orbit, which is not within the ecliptic but inclined 17 degrees to it—suggests that Nibiru itself followed an inclined path. Sumerian instructions for its observation, fully discussed in The 12th Planet, indicate that relative to the ecliptic it arrived from the southeast, from under the ecliptic; formed an arc above the ecliptic; then plunged back below the ecliptic in its journey back to where it had come from.
Amazingly, Halley's comet shows the same characteristics, and except for the fact that its orbit is so much smaller than that of Nibiru (currently about 76 years compared with Nibiru' s 3,600 Earth-years), an illustration of Halley's orbit (Fig. 26) could give us a good idea of Nibiru's inclined and retrograde path. Looking at Halley's comet, we see a miniature Nibiru! This orbital similarity is but one of the aspects that make this comet, and others too, messengers from the past—not only the historic past, but all the way back to Genesis.
Halley's comet is not alone in having an orbit markedly inclined to the ecliptic (a feature measured as an angle of Declination) and a retrograde direction. Nonperiodic comets— comets whose paths form not ellipses but parabolas or even hyperbolas and whose orbits are so vast and whose limits are so far away they cannot even be calculated—have marked declinations, and about half of them move in a retrograde direction. Of about 600 periodic comets (which are now given the letter "P" in front of their name) that have been classified and catalogued, about 500 have orbital periods longer than 200 years; they all have declinations more akin to that of Halley's than to the greater declinations of the nonperiodic comets, and more than half of them course in retrograde motion. Comets with medium orbital periods (between 200 and 20 years) and short periods (under 20 years) have a mean declination of 18 degrees, and some, like Halley's, have retained the retrograde motion in spite of the immense gravitational effects of Jupiter. It is noteworthy that of recently discovered comets, the one designated P/Hartley-IRAS (1983v) has an orbital period of 21 years, and its orbit is both retrograde and inclined to the ecliptic.
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Where do comets come from, and what causes their odd orbits, of which the retrograde direction is the oddest in as- tronomers' eyes? In the 1820s the Marquis Pierre-Simon de Laplace believed that comets were made of ice and that their glowing head ("coma") and tail that formed as they neared the Sun, were both made of vaporized ice. This concept was replaced after the discovery of the extent and nature of the asteroid belt, and theories developed that comets were "flying sandbanks"—pieces of rock that might be the remains of a disintegrated planet. The thinking changed again in the 1950s mainly because of two hypotheses: Fred L. Whipple (then at Harvard) suggested that comets were "dirty snowballs" of ice (mainly water ice) mixed with darker specks of sandlike ma- terial; and Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer, proposed that long- period comets come from a vast reservoir halfway between the Sun and the nearer stars. Because comets appear from all di- rections (traveling prograde, or anticlockwise; retrograde; and at different declinations), the reservoir of comets—billions of them—is not a belt or ring like the asteroid belt or the rings of Saturn but a sphere that surrounds the Solar System. This "Oort Cloud," as the concept came to be named, settled at a mean distance, Oort calculated, of 100,000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, one AU being the average distance (93 million miles) of the Earth from the Sun. Because of pertur- bations and intercometal collisions, some of the cometary horde may have come closer, to only 50,000 AU from the Sun (which is still ten thousand times the distance of Jupiter from the Sun). Passing stars occasionally perturb these comets and send them flying toward the Sun. Some, under the gravitational influence of the planets, mainly Jupiter, become medium- or short-period comets; some, especially influenced by the mass of Jupiter, are forced into reversing their course (Fig. 27). This, briefly, is how the Oort Cloud concept is usually stated.
Since the 1950s the number of observed comets has increased by more than 50 percent, and computer technology has made possible the projection backward of cometary motions to de- termine their source. Such studies, as one by a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory under Brian G. Marsden, have shown that of 200 observed comets with periods of 250 years or more, no more than 10 percent could have entered the
The Messengers of Genesis 73
Figure 27
Solar System from outer space; 90 percent have always been bound to the Sun as the focus of their orbits. Studies of com- etary velocities have shown, in the words of Fred L. Whipple in his book, The Mystery of Comets, that "if we are really seeing comets coming from the void, we should expect them to fly by much faster than just 0.8 kilometers per second," which they do not. His conclusion is that "with few exceptions, comets belong to the Sun's family and are gravitationally at- tached to it."
"During the past few years, astronomers have questioned the simple view of Oort's Cloud," stated Andrew Theokas of Boston University in the New Scientist (February 11, 1988); "astronomers still believe that the Oort Cloud exists, but the new results demand that they reconsider its size and shape.
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They even reopen the questions about the origin of the Oort Cloud and whether it contains "new' comets that have come from interstellar space." As an alternative idea Theokas men- tions that of Mark Bailey of the University of Manchester, who suggested that most comets "reside relatively close to the Sun, just beyond the orbits of the planets." Is it perhaps, one may ask, where Nibiru/Marduk's "distant abode"—its aphelion— is?
The interesting aspect of the "reconsideration" of the Oort Cloud notion and the new data suggesting that comets, by and large, have always been part of the Solar System and not just outsiders occasionally thrust into it, is that Jan Oort himself had said so. The existence of a cloud of comets in interstellar space was his solution to the problem of parabolic and hyper- bolic cometal orbits, not the theory he had developed. In the study that made him and the Oort Cloud famous ("The Struc- ture of the Cloud of Comets Surrounding the Solar System and a Hypothesis Concerning its Origin," Bulletin of the Astro- nomical Institutions of the Netherlands vol. 11, January 13, 1950) Oort's new theory was called by him a "hypothesis of a common origin of comets and minor planets" (i.e., aster- oids). The comets are out there, he suggested, not because they were "born" there but because they were thrust out to there. They were fragments of larger objects, "diffused away" by the perturbations of the planets and especially by Jupiter— just as more recently the Pioneer spacecraft were made to fly off into space by the "slingshot" effects of Jupiter's and Sat- urn's gravitation.
"The main process now," Oort wrote, "is the inverse one, that of a slow transfer of comets from a large cloud into short- period orbits. But at the epoch at which the minor planets (asteroids) were formed . . . the trend must have been the op- posite, many more objects being transferred from the asteroid region to the comet cloud. . . . It appears far more probable that instead of having originated in the faraway regions, comets were born among the planets. It is natural to think in the first place of a relation with the minor planets (asteroids). There are indications that the two classes of objects"—comets and asteroids—"belong to the same 'species.' . . . It seems rea- sonable to assume that the comets originated together with the minor planets." Summing up his study, Oort put it this way:
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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.
It all begins to sound like the Enuma elish. . . .
Placing the origin of the comets within the asteroid belt and considering both comets and asteroids as belonging to the same "species" of celestial objects—objects of a common birth— still leaves open the questions: How were these objects created? What gave "birth" to them? What "diffused" the comets? What gave comets their inclinations and retrograde motions?
A major and outspoken study on the subject was made public in 1978 by Thomas C. Van Flandern of the U.S. Naval Ob- servatory, Washington, D.C. (Icarus, 36). He titled the study, "A Former Asteroidal Planet as the Origin of Comets," and openly subscribed to the nineteenth-century suggestions that the asteroids, and the comets, come from a former planet that had exploded. It is noteworthy that in the references to Oort's work, Van Flandern picked out its true essence: "Even the father of the modern 'cloud of comets' theory was led to con- clude," Van Flandern wrote, "on the basis of evidence then available, that a solar system origin for these comets, perhaps in connection with 'the occurrence which gave birth to the belt of asteroids,' was still the least objectionable hypothesis." He also referred to studies, begun in 1972, by Michael W. Oven- den, a noted Canadian astronomer who introduced the concept of a "principle of least interaction action," a corollary of which was the suggestion that "there had existed, between Mars and Jupiter, a planet of a mass of about 90 times that of Earth, and that this planet had 'disappeared' in the relatively recent past, about 107 [10,000,000] years ago." This, Ovenden further explained in 1975 ("Bode's Law—Truth or Consequences?" vol. 18, Vistas in Astronomy), is the only way to meet the requirement that "the cosmogonic theory must be capable of producing retrograde as well as direct" celestial motions.
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.
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In all probability it was the same event which gave rise to the asteroid belt and which produced most of the me- teors 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 had no doubt, however, that the "breakup event" took place "in the asteroid belt." Physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the re- sulting celestial bodies, he stated emphatically, indicate "that a large planet did disintegrate'' where the asteroid belt is today.
But what caused this large planet to disintegrate? "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...
A key criticism of the destroyed-planet theory has been the problem of the whereabouts of the planet's matter; when as- tronomers estimate the total mass of the known asteroids and comets it adds up to only a fraction of the estimated mass of the broken-up planet. This is especially true if Ovenden's es- timate of a planet with a mass ninety times that of Earth is used in the calculations. Ovenden's response to such criticism has been that the missing mass was probably swept up by Jupiter; his own calculations (Monthly Notes of the Royal As- tronomical Society, 173, 1975) called for an increase in the mass of Jupiter by as much as 130 Earth-masses as a result of the capture of asteroids, including Jupiter's several retrograde moons. To allow for the discrepancy between the mass (ninety times that of Earth) of the broken-up planet and the accretion of 130 Earth-sized masses to Jupiter, Ovenden cited other stud- ies that concluded that Jupiter's mass had decreased some time in its past.
Rather than to first inflate the size of Jupiter and then shrink it back, a better scenario would be to shrink the estimated size of the destroyed planet. That is what the Sumerian texts have
The Messengers of Genesis 77
put forth. If Earth is the remaining half of Tiamal, then Tiamat was roughly twice the size of Earth, not ninety times. Studies of the asteroid belt reveal not only capture by Jupiter but a dispersion of the asteroids from their assumed original site at about 2.8 AU to a zone so wide that it occupies the space between 1.8 AU and 4 AU. Some asteroids are found between Jupiter and Saturn; a recently discovered one (2060 Chiron) is located between Saturn and Uranus at 13.6 AU. The smashup of the destroyed planet must have been, therefore, extremely forceful—as in a catastrophic collision.
In addition to the voids between groups of asteroids, as- tronomers discern gaps within the clusters of asteroids (Fig. 28). The latest theories hold that there had been asteroids in the gaps but they were ejected, all the way to outer space except for those that may have been captured on the way by the gravitational forces of the outer planets; also, the asteroids that used to be in the "gaps" were probably destroyed "by catastrophic collisions"! (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of As- tronomy, 1983). In the absence of valid explanations for such ejections and catastrophic collisions, the only plausible theory is that offered by the Sumerian texts, which describe the orbit of Nibiru/Marduk as a vast, elliptical path that brings it pe- riodically (every 3,600 Earth years, by my calculations) back into the asteroid belt. As Figures 10 and 11 show, the conclu- sion drawn from the ancient texts was that Nibiru/Marduk
Figure 28
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passed by Tiamat on her outer, or Jupiter, side; repeated returns to that celestial zone can account for the size of the "gap" there. It is the periodic return of Nibiru/Marduk that causes the "ejecting" and "sweeping."
By the acknowledgment of the existence of Nibiru and its 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 relatively recent time (millions, not billions, of years ago). Depending on where Jupiter was at the times of Nibiru's perihelion, the accretions might have occurred during various passages of Nibiru and not necessarily as a one-and-only event at the time of the cata- strophic 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" (McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Astronomy). The suggested time of the catastrophe is the very time indicated in The 12th 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 cata- strophic event (about 4 billion years ago). They also corro- borate the ancient texts in the vital matter of water.
The presence of water, the mingling of waters, the separation of waters—all somehow played an important role in the tale of Tiamat, Nibiru/Marduk, and the Celestial Battle and its aftermath. Part of the puzzle was already answered when we showed that the ancient notion of the asteroid belt as a divider of the waters "above" and the water "below" is corroborated by modern science. But there was more to this preoccupation with water. Tiamat was described as a "watery monster," and the Mesopotamian texts speak of the handling of her waters by Nibiru/Marduk:
The Messengers of Genesis 79
Half of her he stretched as a ceiling to be 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 planets 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." References to the waters where the Celestial Battle and the creation of the Earth and the Shama'im took place are frequent in the Old Testament, indicating mil- lennia-old familiarity with Sumerian cosmogony even at the time of the Prophets and Judean kings. 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 dish; in both instances, the placing of the asteroid belt "where the waters were" followed the earlier acts of the splitting up of Tiamat and having the invader's "wind" thrust the half that became Earth into a new orbit. The waters of Earth would explain the whereabouts of some or most of Tia- mat's waters. But what about the remains of her other part and of her satellites? If the asteroids and comets are those remains, should they not 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.
Most asteroids belong to two classes. About 15 percent be- long to the S type, which have reddish surfaces made up of silicates and metallic iron. About 15 percent are of the C type: they are carbonaceous (containing carbon), and it is these that have been found to contain water. The water discovered in such asteroids (through spectrographic studies) is not in liquid form; since asteroids have no atmospheres, any water on their
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surface would quickly dissipate. But the presence of water molecules in the surface materials indicates that the minerals that make up the asteroid have captured water and combined with it. Direct confirmation of this finding was observed in August 1982, when a small asteroid that came too close to Earth plunged into the Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated; it was seen as "a rainbow with a long tail going across the sky." A rainbow appears when sunlight falls on a collection of water drops, such as rain, fog, or spray.
When the asteroid is more like what its name originally implied, "minor planet," actual water in liquid form could well be present. Examination of the infrared spectrum of the largest and first-to-be-discovered asteroid Ceres shows an extra dip in the spectral readings that is the result of free water rather than water bound to minerals. Since free water even on Ceres will quickly evaporate, the astronomers surmise that Ceres must have a constant source of water welling up from its in- terior. "If that source has been there throughout the career of Ceres," wrote the British astronomer Jack Meadows (Space Garbage—Cornels, Meteors and Other Solar-System Debris), "then it must have started life as a very wet lump of rock." He pointed out that carbonaceous meteorites also "show signs of having been extensively affected by water in times past."
The celestial body designated 2060 Chiron, interesting in many ways, also confirms the presence of water in the remnants of the Celestial Battle. When Charles Kowal of the Hale Ob- servatories on Mount Palomar, California, discovered it in November 1977, he was not certain what it was. He simply referred to it as a planetoid, named it temporarily "O-K" for "Object Kowal," and opined that it might be a wayward sat- ellite of either Saturn or Uranus. Several weeks of follow-up studies revealed an orbit much more elliptical than that of planets or planetoids, one closer to that of comets. By 1981 the object was determined to be an asteroid, perhaps one of others to be found reaching as far out as Uranus, Neptune or beyond, and was given the designation 2060 Chiron. However, by 1989, further observations by astronomers at Kitt Peak National Observatory (Arizona) detected an extended atmo- sphere of carbon dioxide and dust around Chiron, suggesting that it is more cometlike. The latest observations have also
The Messengers of Genesis 81
established that Chiron "is essentially a dirty snowball com- posed of water, dust and carbon-dioxide ice."
If Chiron proves to be more a comet than an asteroid, it will only serve as further evidence that both classes of these rem- nants of the Genesis event contain water.
When a comet is far away from the Sun, it is a dark and invisible object. As it nears the Sun, the Sun's radiation brings the comet's nucleus to life. It develops a gaseous head (the coma) and then a tail made up of gases and dust ejected by the nucleus as it heats up. It is the observation of these emis- sions that has by and large confirmed Whipple's view of comets as "dirty snowballs," first by determining that the onset of activity in comets as the nucleus begins to heat up is consistent with the thermodynamic properties of water ice, and then by spectroscopic analysis of the gaseous emissions, which have invariably shown the presence of the compound H2O (i.e., water).
The presence of water in comets has been definitely estab- lished in recent years through enhanced examination of arriving comets. 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 findings, it was reported at the time, provided "the first direct proof of water" in a comet. "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. And all scientists concurred with the evaluation by astrophysicists at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich that was seen were "the oldest and essentially unchanged specimens of the material from the birth of the Solar System."
Subsequent cometary observations confirmed these findings. However, none of those studies, accomplished with a variety of instruments, match the intensity with which Halley's comet was probed in 1986. The Halley findings established unequiv- ocally that the comet was a watery celestial body.
Apart from several only partly successful efforts by the United States to examine the comet from a distance, Halley's comet was met by a virtual international welcoming flotilla of
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Figure 29
five spacecraft, all unmanned. The Soviets directed to a Comet Halley rendezvous Vega 1 and Vega 2 (Fig. 29a), the Japanese sent the spacecraft Sakigake and Suisei, and the European Space Agency launched Giotto (Fig. 29b)—so named in honor of the Florentine master painter Giotto di Bondone (fourteenth century), who was so enchanted by Halley's comet when it appeared in his time that he included it, streaking across the
The Messengers of Genesis 83
sky, in his famous fresco Adoration of the Magi, suggesting that this comet was the Star of Bethlehem in the tale of the birth of Christ (Fig. 30).
As intensive observations began when Halley's comet de- veloped its coma and tail in November 1985, astronomers at the Kitt Peak Observatory tracking the comet with telescopes reported it was certain "that the comet's dominant constituent is water ice, and that much of the tenuous 360,000-mile-wide cloud surrounding it consisted of water vapor." A statement by Susan Wyckoff of Arizona State University claimed that
i
Figure 30
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"this was the first strong evidence that water ice was preva- lent." These telescopic observations were augmented in Jan- uary 1986 by infrared observations from high-altitude aircraft, whereupon a team made up of NASA scientists and astrono- mers from several American universities announced "direct confirmation that water was a major constituent of Halley's comet."
By January 1986, Halley's comet had developed an immense tail and a halo of hydrogen gas that measured 12.5 million miles across—fifteen times bigger than the diameter of the Sun. It was then that NASA's engineers commanded the space- craft Pioneer-Venus (which was orbiting Venus) to turn its instruments toward the nearing comet (at its perihelion Halley's passed between Venus and Mercury). The spacecraft's spec- trometer, which "sees" the atoms of its subject, revealed that "the comet was losing 12 tons of water per second." As it neared perihelion on March 6, 1986, Ian Stewart, the director of NASA's Halley's project at the Ames Research Center, reported that the rate of water loss "increased enormously," first to 30 tons a second and then to 70 tons a second; he assured the press, however, that even at this rate Halley's comet had "enough water ice to last thousands of more orbits."
The close encounters with Halley's comet began on March 6, 1986, when Vega 1 plunged through Halley's radiant at- mosphere and, from a distance of less than 6,000 miles, sent the first-ever pictures of its icy core. The press dutifully noted that what Mankind was seeing was the nucleus of a celestial body that had evolved when the Solar System began. On March 9, Vega 2 flew within 5,200 miles of Halley's nucleus and confirmed the findings of Vega 1. The spacecraft also revealed that the comet's "dust" contained chunks of solid matter, some boulder size, and that this heavier crust or layer enveloped a nucleus where the temperature—almost 90 million miles from the Sun—was a hot 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
The two Japanese spacecraft, designed to study the effect of the solar wind on the comet's tail and the comet's huge hydrogen cloud, were targeted to pass at substantial distances from Halley's. But Giotto's mission was to meet the comet virtually head-on, swooping at an immense encounter speed within 300 mites from the comet's core. On March 14 (Eu-
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ropean time), Giotto streaked past the heart of Halley's comet and revealed a "mysterious nucleus," its color blacker than coal, its size bigger than had been thought (about half the size of Manhattan Island). The shape of the nucleus was rough and irregular (Fig. 31), some describing it as "two peas in a pod" and some as an irregularly shaped "potato." From the nucleus five main jets were emitting streams of dust and 80 percent water vapor, indicating that within the carbonaceous crust the comet contained "melted ice"—liquid water.
Figure 31
The first comprehensive review of the results of all these close-up observations was published in Nature's special sup- plement of 15-21 May, 1986. In the series of very detailed reports, the Soviet team confirmed the first findings that water (H2O) is the comet's major component, followed by carbon and hydrogen compounds. The Giotto report stated repeatedly that "H2O is the dominant parent molecule in Halley's coma," and that "water vapor accounts for about 80% of the volume of gases escaping from the comet." These preliminary con- clusions were reaffirmed in October 1986, at an international
86 GENESIS REVISITED
conference in Heidelberg, West Germany. 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) re- vealed an explosion on Hailey's Comet that blew 100 cubic feet of ice out of the comet's nucleus.
There was water everywhere on these Messengers of Gen- esis!
Studies have shown that comets coming in from the cold "come to life" as they reach a distance of between 3 to 2.5 AU, and that water is the first substance to unfreeze there. Little significance has been given to the fact that this distance from the Sun is the zone of the asteroid belt, and one must wonder whether it is there that comets come to life because it is where they were born—whether water comes to life there because there is where it had been, on Tiamat and her watery host ___
In the discoveries concerning the comets and the asteroids, something else came to life: the ancient knowledge of Sumer.
The Messengers of Genesis 87
CELESTIAL "SEEING EYES"
When the Anunnaki's Mission Earth reached its full com- plement, there were six hundred of them on Earth, while three hundred remained in orbit, servicing the shuttle craft. The Sumerian term for the latter was IGI.GI, literally "Those who observe and see."
Archaeologists have found in Mesopotamia many objects they call "eye idols" (a), as well as shrines dedicated to these "gods" (b). Texts refer to devices used by the An- unnaki to "scan the Earth from end to end." These texts and depictions imply the use by the Anunnaki of Earth- orbiting, celestial "seeing eyes"—satellites that "observe and see."
Perhaps it is no coincidence that some of the Earth-scan- ning, and especially fixed-position communications satel- lites launched in our own modern times, such as Intelsat- IV and Intelsat IV-A (c, d), look so much like these mil- lennia-old depictions.
5
GAIA: THE CLEAVED PLANET
Why do we call our planet "Earth"?
In German it is Erde, from Erda in Old High German; Jordh
in Icelandic, Jord in Danish. Erthe in Middle English, Airtha in Gothic; and going eastward geographically and backward in time, Ereds or Aratha in Aramaic, Erd or Ertz in Kurdish, Eretz in Hebrew. The sea we nowadays call the Arabian Sea, the body of water that leads to the Persian Gulf, was called in antiquity the Sea of Erythrea; and to this day, ordu means an encampment or settlement in Persian. Why?
The answer lies in the Sumerian texts that relate the arrival of the first group of Anunnaki/Nefilim on Earth. There were fifty of them, under the leadership of E.A ("Whose Home is Water"), a great scientist and the Firstborn son of the ruler of Nibiru, ANU. 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 (Fig. 32). And at the head of the marshlands they established their first set- tlement on a new planet; it was called by them E.RI.DU— "Home In the Faraway"—a most appropriate name.
And so it was that in time the whole settled planet came to be called after that first settlement—Erde, Erthe, 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 honor the first group of Anunnaki who established it.
The Sumerian scientific or technical term for Earth's globe and its firm surface was KI. Pictographically it was represented as a somewhat flattened orb (Fig. 33a) crossed by vertical lines not unlike modern depictions of meridians (Fig. 33b). Since Earth does indeed bulge somewhat at its equator, the Sumerian
88
Figure 32
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 89
Figure 33
90 GENESIS REVISITED
representation is more correct scientifically than the usual mod- ern way of depicting Earth as a perfect globe. . . .
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 "ex- cavation," 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 ce- lestial body that had been cleaved apart."
By calling Earth KI, the Sumerians thus invoked their cos- mogony—the tale of the Celestial Battle and the cleaving of Tiamat.
Unaware of its origin we continue to apply this descriptive epithet to our planet to this very day. 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, Assyr- ian, Hebrew), at all times retaining its geographic or topo- graphic 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 crevicelike narrow ravine outside Jerusalem named after Hinnom, where divine retribution shall befall the sinners via an erupting subterranean fire on Judgment Day.
We have been taught in school that the component geo in all the scientific terms applied to Earth sciences—geo-graphy, goo-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.
Scholars agree that the Greek notions of primordial events and of the gods were borrowed from the Near East, through Asia Minor (at whose western edge early Greek settlements like Troy were located) and via the island of Crete in the eastern Mediterranean. According to Greek tradition Zeus, who was
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 91
Figure 34
the chief god of the twelve Olympians, arrived on the Greek mainland via Crete, whence he had fled after abducting the beautiful Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king of Tyre. Aphrodite arrived from the Near East via the island of Cyprus. Poseidon (whom the Romans called Neptune) came on horse- back via Asia Minor, and Athena brought the olive to Greece from the lands of the Bible. There is no doubt that the Greek alphabet developed from a Near Eastern one (Fig. 34). Cyrus
92 GENESIS REVISITED
H. Gordon (Forgotten Scripts: Evidence for the Minoan Lan- guage and other works) deciphered the enigmatic Cretan script known as Linear A by showing that it represented a Semitic, Near Eastern language. With the Near Eastern gods and the terminology came also the "myths" and legends.
The earliest Greek writings concerning antiquity and the affairs of gods and men were the Iliad, by Homer; the Odes of Pindar of Thebes; and above all the Theogony ("Divine Genealogy") by Hesiod, who composed this work and another (Works and Days). In the eighth century B.C., Hesiod began the divine tale of events that ultimately led to the supremacy of Zeus—a story of passions, rivalries, and struggles covered in The Wars of Gods and Men, third book of my series The Earth Chronicles—and the creation of the celestial gods, of Heaven and Earth out of Chaos, a tale not unlike the biblical Beginning:
Verily, at first Chaos came to be,
and next the wide-bosomed Gaia--
she who created all the immortal ones
who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus:
Dim Tartarus, wide-pathed in the depths,
and Eros, fairest among the divine immortals. . . . From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Nyx; And of Nyx were born Aether and Hemera.
At this point in the process of the formation of the "divine immortals"—the celestial gods—"Heaven" does not yet ex- ist, just as the Mesopotamian sources recounted. Accordingly, the "Gaia" of these verses is the equivalent of Tiamat, "she who bore them all" according to the Enuma elish. Hesiod lists the celestial gods who followed "Chaos" and "Gaia" in three pairs (Tartarus and Eros, Erebus and Nyx, Aether and Hemera). The parallel with the creation of the three pairs in Sumerian cosmogony (nowadays named Venus and Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune) should be obvious (though this comparability seems to have gone unnoticed).
Only after the creation of the principal planets that made up the Solar System when Nibiru appeared to invade it does the tale by Hesiod—as in the Mesopotamian and biblical texts— speak of the creation of Ouranos, "Heaven." As explained in
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 93
the Book of Genesis, this Shama'im was the Hammered-Out- Bracelet, the asteroid belt. As related in the Enuma elish, this was the half of Tiamat that was smashed to pieces, while the other, intact half became Earth. All this is echoed in the ensuing verses of Hesiod's Theogony:
And Gaia then bore starry Ouranos —equal to herself--
to envelop her on every side,
to be an everlasting abode place for the gods.
Equally split up. Gaia ceased to be Tiamat. Severed from the smashed-up half that became the Firmament, everlasting abode of the asteroids and comets, the intact half (thrust into another orbit) became Gaia, the Earth. And so did this planet, first as Tiamat and then as Earth, live up to its epithets: Gaia, Gi, Ki—the Cleaved One.
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 (now 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
94 GENESIS REVISITED
that throughout 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 sci- ence—knowledge, the Sumerians asserted, bestowed by the Anunnaki.
According to that ancient knowledge, Earth was not an orig- inal member of the Solar System. It was the cleaved-off half of a planet then called Tiamat, "she who bore them all." The Celestial Battle that led to the creation of Earth occurred several hundred million years after the Solar System with its planets had been created. Earth, as a part of Tiamat, retained much of the water that Tiamat, "the watery monster," was known for. As Earth evolved into an independent planet and attained the shape of a globe dictated by the forces of gravity, the waters were gathered into the immense cavity on the torn-off side, and dry land appeared on the other side of the planet
This, in summary, is what the ancient peoples firmly be- lieved. What does modern science have to say?
The theories concerning planetary formation hold that they started as balls congealing from the gaseous disk extending from the Sun. As they cooled, heavier matter—iron, in Earth's case—sank into their centers, forming a solid inner core. A less solid, plastic, or even fluid outer core surrounded the inner one; in Earth's case, it is believed to consist of molten iron. The two cores and their motions act as a dynamo, producing the planet's magnetic field. Surrounding the solid and fluid cores is a mantle made of rocks and minerals; on Earth it is estimated to be some 1,800 miles thick. While the fluidity and heat generated at the planet's core (some 12,000 degrees Fahr- enheit in the Earth's center) affect the mantle and what is on top of it, it is the uppermost 400 miles or so of the mantle (on Earth) that mostly account for what we see on the surface of the planet—its cooled crust.
The processes that produce, over billions of years, a spher- ical orb—the uniform force of gravity and the planet's rotation around its axis—should also result in an orderly layering. The solid inner core, the flexible or fluid outer core, the thick lower mantle of silicates, the upper mantle of rocks, and the upper- most crust should encompass one another in ordered layers,
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 95
Figure 35
like the skin of an onion. This holds true for the orb called Earth (Fig. 35)—but only up to a point; the main abnormalities concern Earth's uppermost layer, the crust.
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 of 1 percent of the Earth's land- mass. In 1988, geophysicists from Caltech and the University of Illinois at Urbana, led by Don Anderson, reported to the American Geological Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, that they had found the "missing crust." By analyzing shock waves from earthquakes, they concluded that material that be- longs 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 land- mass—still only about half of what seems to be the norm (judging by the Moon and Mars); half of the Earth's crust wi!i
96 GENESIS REVISITED
still be missing even if the findings by this group prove correct. The theory also 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. The team's suggestion was that the crustal material down there consists of "huge slabs of crust" that "dived into the Earth's interior" where fissures exist in the crust. But what force had broken up the crust into such "huge slabs"?
Figure 36
Another abnormality of the Earth's crust is that it is not uniform. In the parts we call "continents," its thickness varies from about 12 miles to almost 45 miles; but in the parts taken up by the oceans the crust is only 3.5 to five miles thick. While the average elevation of the continents is about 2,300 feet, the average depth of the oceans is more than 12,500 feet. The combined result of these factors is that the much thicker con- tinental crust reaches much farther down into the mantle, whereas the oceanic crust is just a thin layer of solidified ma- terial and sediments (Fig. 36).
There are other differences between the Earth's crust where the continents are and where the oceans are. The composition
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 97
of the continental crust, consisting in large part of rocks re- sembling granite, is relatively light in comparison with the composition of the mantle: the average continental density is 2.7-2.8 grams per cubic centimeter, while that of the mantle is 3.3 grams per cubic centimeter. The oceanic crust is heavier and denser than the continental crust, averaging a density of 3.0 to 3.1 grams per cubic centimeter; it is thus more akin to the mantle, with its composition of basaltic and other dense rocks, than to the continental crust. It is noteworthy that the "missing crust" the scientific team mentioned above suggested had dived into the mantle is similar in composition to the oceanic crust, not to the continental crust.
This leads to one more important difference between the Earth's continental and oceanic crusts. The continental part of the crust is not only lighter and thicker, it is also much older than the oceanic part of the crust. By the end of the 1970s the consensus among scientists was that the greater part of today's continental surface was formed some 2.8 billion years ago. Evidence of a continental crust from that time that was about as thick as today's is found in all the continents in what ge- ologists term Archean Shield areas; but within those areas, crustal rocks were discovered that turned out to be 3.8 billion years old. In 1983, however, geologists of the Australian Na- tional University found, in western Australia, rock remains of a continental crust whose age was established to be 4.1 to 4.2 billion years old. In 1989, tests with new, sophisticated meth- ods on rock samples collected a few years earlier in northern Canada (by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis and from the Geological Survey of Canada) determined the rocks' age to be 3.96 billion years; Samuel Bowering of Washington University reported evidence that nearby rocks in the area were as much as 4.1 billion years old.
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.
98 GENESIS REVISITED
This is a tremendous difference that no amount of speculation about rising and sinking continents, forming and vanishing seas can explain. Someone has compared the Earth's crust to the skin of an apple. Where the oceans are, the "skin" is fresh— relatively speaking, born yesterday. Where the oceans began in primordial times, the "skin," and a good part of the "apple" itself, appear to have been shorn off.
The differences between the continental and oceanic crusts must have been even greater in earlier times, because the con- tinental 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 on the surface of the Earth where it was so "wounded" is the Pacific Ocean. While the average plunge in the crust's surface in its oceanic parts is about 2.5 miles, in the Pacific the crust has been gouged out to a present depth reaching at some points 7 miles. If we could remove from the Pacific's floor the crust built up there over the last 200 million years, we would arrive at depths reaching 12 miles below the water's surface and between some 20 to nearly 60 miles below the continental surface. This is quite a cavity. . . . How deep was it before the crustal buildup over the past 200 million years—how large was the "wound" 500 million years ago, a billion years ago, 4 billion years ago? No one can even guess, except to say that it was substantially deeper.
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 million years) it has been shrinking. The reason
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 99
for the shrinkage is that the continents flanking it—the Amer- icas on the east, Asia and Australia on the west—are moving closer to each other, squeezing out the Pacific slowly but re- lentlessly, 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. Its origin lies, as in the study of the Solar System, in the discarding of notions of a uniform, stable, permanent condition of the planets in favor of the recognition of catastrophism, change, and even evolution—concerning not only flora and fauna but the globes on which they evolved as "living" entities that can grow and shrink, prosper and suffer, even be born and die.
The new science of plate tectonics, it is now generally rec- ognized, owes its beginning to Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, and his book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, published in 1915. As it was for others before him, his starting point was the obvious "fit" between the contours of the continents on both sides of the southern At- lantic. But before Wegener's ideas, the solution had been to postulate the disappearance, by sinking, of continents or land bridges: the belief that the continents have been where they are from time immemorial, but that a midsection sank below sea level, giving the appearance of continental separation. Aug- menting available data on flora and fauna with considerable geological "matches" between the two sides of the Atlantic, Wegener came up with the notion of Pangaea—a supercon- tinent, a single huge landmass into which he could fit all the present continental masses like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Pan- gaea, which covered about one half of the globe, Wegener suggested, was surrounded by the primeval Pacific Ocean. Floating in the midst of the waters like an ice floe, the single landmass underwent a series of liftings and healings until a definite and final breakup in the Mesozoic Era, the geological period that lasted from 225 to 65 million years ago. Gradually the pieces began to drift apart. Antarctica, Australia, India, and Africa began to break away and separate (Fig. 37a). Sub- sequently, Africa and South America split apart (Fig. 37b) as North America began to move away from Europe and India was thrust toward Asia (Fig. 37c); and so the continents con- tinued to drift until they rearranged themselves in the pattern we know today (Fig. 37d).
100 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 37
The split-up of Pangaea into several separate continents was accompanied by the opening up and closing down of bodies of water between the separating pieces of the landmass. In time the single "Panocean" (if I may be allowed to coin a term) also separated into a series of connecting oceans or enclosed seas (such as the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian seas), and such major bodies of water as the Atlantic and the Indian oceans took shape. But all these bodies of water were "pieces" of the original "Panocean," of which the Pacific Ocean still remains.
Wegener's view of the continents as "pieces of a cracked ice floe" shifting atop an impermanent surface of the Earth was mostly received with disdain, even ridicule, by the ge- ologists and paleontologists of the time. It took half a century for the idea of Continental Drift to be accepted into the halls of science. What helped bring about the changed attitude were surveys of the ocean floors begun in the 1960s that revealed such features as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that, it was surmised, was formed by the rise of molten rock (called "magma") from
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 101
the Earth's interior. Welling up, in the case of the Atlantic, through a fissure in the ocean floor that runs almost the whole ocean's length, the magma cooled and formed a ridge of bas- altic rock. But then as one welling up followed another, the old sides of the ridge were pushed to either side to make way for the new magma flow. A major advance in these studies of the ocean floors took place with the aid of Seasat, an ocean- ographic satellite launched in June 1978 that orbited the Earth for three months; its data were used to map the sea floors, giving us an entirely new understanding of our oceans, with their ridges, rifts, seamounts, underwater volcanoes, and frac- ture zones. The discovery that as each upwelling of magma cooled and solidified it retained the magnetic direction of its position at that time was followed by the determination that a series of such magnetic lines, almost parallel to one another, provided a time scale as well as a directional map for the ongoing expansion of the ocean's floor. This expansion of the sea floor in the Atlantic was a major factor in pushing apart Africa and South America and in the creation of the Atlantic Ocean (and its continuing widening).
Other forces, such as the gravitational pull of the Moon, the Earth's rotation, and even movements of the underlying man- tle, also are believed to act to split up the continental crust and shift the continents about. These forces also exert their influ- ence, naturally, in the Pacific region. The Pacific Ocean re- vealed even more midocean ridges, fissures, underwater volcanoes, and other features like those that have worked to expand the Atlantic Ocean. Why, then, as all the evidence shows, have the landmasses flanking the Pacific not moved apart (as the continents flanking the Atlantic have done) but rather keep moving closer, slowly but surely, constantly re- ducing the size of the Pacific Ocean?
The explanation is found in a companion theory of conti- nental drift, the Theory of Plate Tectonics. The continents, it has been postulated, rest upon giant movable "plates" of the Earth's crust, and so do the oceans. When the continents drift, when oceans expand (as the Atlantic) or contract (as the Pa- cific), the underlying cause is the movement of the plates on which they ride. At present scientists recognize six major plates (some of which are further subdivided): the Pacific, American, Eurasian, African, Indo-Australian, and Antarctic (Fig. 38).
102 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 38
The spreading seafloor of the Atlantic Ocean is still distancing the Americas from Europe and Africa, inch by inch. The con- comitant shrinking of the Pacific Ocean is now recognized to be accommodated by the dipping, or "subduction," of the Pacific plate under the American plate. This is the primary cause of the crustal shifts and earthquakes all along the Pacific rim, as well as of the rise of the major mountain chains along that rim. The collision of the Indian plate with the Eurasian one created the Himalayas and fused the Indian subcontinent to Asia. In 1985, Cornell University scientists discovered the "geological suture" where a part of the western African plate remained attached to the American plate when the two broke apart some fifty million years ago, "donating" Florida and southern Georgia to North America.
With some modifications, almost all scientists today accept Wegener's hypothesis of an Earth initially consisting of a single landmass surrounded by an all-embracing ocean. Notwith- standing (geologically) the young age (200 million years) of the present seafloor, scholars recognize that there had been a primeval ocean on Earth whose traces can be found not in the newly covered depths of the oceans but on the continents. The Archean Shield zones, where the youngest rocks are 2.8 billion years old, contain belts of two kinds: one of greenstone, another of granite-gneiss. Writing in Scientific American of March, 1977, Stephen Moorbath ('The Oldest Rocks and the Growth of Continents"") reported (hat geologists "believe that the
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 103
greenstone belt rocks were deposited in a primitive oceanic environment and in effect represent ancient oceans, and that the granite-gneiss terrains may be remnants of ancient oceans.'' Extensive rock records in virtually all the continents indicate that they were contiguous to oceans of water for more than three billion years; in some places, such as Zimbabwe in south- ern Africa, sedimentary rocks show that they accreted within large bodies of water some 3.5 billion years ago. And recent advances in scientific dating have extended the age of the Archean belts—those that include rocks that had been depos- ited in primeval oceans—back to 3.8 billion years (Scientific American, September, 1983; special issue: "The Dynamic Earth").
How long has continental drift been going on? Was there a Pangaea?
Stephen Moorbath, in the above-mentioned study, offered the conclusion that the process of continental breakup began some 600 million years ago: "Before that there may have been just the one immense supercontinent known as Pangaea, or possibly two supercontinents: Laurasia to the north and Gond- wanaland to the south." Other scientists, using computer sim- ulations, suggest that 550 million years ago the landmasses that eventually formed Pangaea or its two connected parts were no less separate than they are today, that plate-tectonic pro- cesses of one kind or another have been going on since at least about four billion years ago. But whether the mass of dry land was first a single supercontinent or separate landmasses that then joined, 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 land mass/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
104 GENESIS REVISITED
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 disklike 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. We find that the Old Testament repeatedly referred to the "founda- tions" of Earth and expressed knowledge of the earlier times regarding the shape of Earth in the following verses praising the Creator:
The Lord's is the Earth and its entirety, the world and all that dwells therein. For He hath founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.
(Psalms 24:1-2)
In addition to the term Eretz which means both planet "Earth" and "earth, ground." the narrative in Genesis em- ploys the term Yabashah—literally, "the dried-out land- mass"—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 Te- bel—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 Psalms 18:16):
The Lord thundered from the heavens,
the Most High his sounds uttered.
He loosed his arrows, sped them far and wide; a shaft of lightning, and disconcerted them. The channels of the seabed were revealed,
the foundation of Tebel were laid bare.
With what we know today about the "foundations of the Earth," the word Tebel clearly conveys the concept of conti-
Gaia: The Cleaved Planet 105
nents whose foundations—tectonic plates-—are laid in the midst of the waters. What a thrill to discover the latest geo- physical theories echoed in a 3,000-year-old psalm!
The Genesis narrative states clearly that the waters were "gathered together" to one side of the Earth so that the dry land could emerge; this implies the existence of a cavity into which the waters could be gathered. Such a cavity, somewhat over half the Earth's surface, is still there, shrunken and re- duced, in the shape of the Pacific Ocean.
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 of the Solar System? The first Conference on the Origins of Life, held in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1967, under the sponsorship of NASA and the Smith- sonian Institution, dwelt at length on this problem. The only hypothesis the learned participants could come up with was that, at the time the oldest rock specimens that have been found were formed, Earth was subjected to a "cataclysm." 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 sed- iments." This "big belch" was also dated to the same time as the catastrophe recorded by the rocks.
It thus becomes evident that in its specifics—the breakup of the Earth's crust, the process of plate tectonics, the differences between the continental and the oceanic crusts, the emergence of a Pangaea from under the waters, the primordial encircling ocean—the findings of modern science have corroborated the ancient knowledge. They have also led scientists from all dis- ciplines 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 of 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 Sys-
106 GENESIS REVISITED
tern were depicted as celestial gods, male and female, whose creation was compared to birth, whose existence was that of living creatures. In the Enuma elish text, Tiamat in particular was described as a female, a mother who gave birth to a host of eleven satellites, her "horde," led by Kingu "whom she elevated." As Nibiru/Marduk and his horde neared her, "in fury Tiamat cried out aloud, her legs shook to their roots . . . against her attacker she repeatedly cast a spell." When the "Lord spread his net to enmesh her" and "the Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face, Tiamat opened her mouth to consume it"; but then other "winds" of Ni- biru/Marduk "charged her belly" and "distended her body." Indeed, "go and cut off the life of Tiamat" was the order given by the outer planets to the Invader; he accomplished that by "cutting through her insides, splitting her heart. . . . Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life."
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 worlds 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 recently 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 which in 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.
6
WITNESS TO GENESIS
Perhaps as an overreaction to Creationism, scientists have con- sidered the biblical tale of Genesis as a subject of faith, not fact. Yet when one of the rocks brought back from the Moon by Apollo astronauts turned out to be almost 4.1 billion years old, it was nicknamed "the Genesis rock." When a tiny piece of green glass shaped like a lima bean turned up in lunar soil samples gathered by the Apollo 14 astronauts, the scientists dubbed it "the Genesis bean." It thus appears that in spite of all the objections and reservations, even the scientific com- munity cannot escape the age-old faith, belief, gut feelings, or perhaps some genetic memory of the species called Mankind, that a primordial truth underlies the narrative of the Book of Genesis.
However the Moon became a constant companion of Earth— the various theories will soon be examined—it, like Earth, belonged to the same Solar System, and the histories of both go back to its creation. On Earth, erosion caused by the forces of nature as well as by the life that has evolved on it has obliterated much of the evidence bearing on that creation, to say nothing of the cataclysmic event that changed and re- vamped the planet. But the Moon, so it was assumed, had remained in its pristine condition. With neither winds, atmos- phere, nor waters, there were no forces of erosion. A look at the Moon was tantamount to a peek at Genesis.
Man has peered at the Moon for eons, first with the naked eye, then with Earth-based instruments. The space age made it possible to probe the Moon more closely. Between 1959 and 1969, a number of Soviet and American unmanned spacecraft photographed and otherwise examined the Moon either by or- biting it or by landing on it. Then Man finally set foot on the
107
108 GENESIS REVISITED
Plate D
Moon when the landing module of Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon's surface on July 20, 1969, and Neil Armstrong announced, for all the world to hear: "Houston! Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed!"
In all, six Apollo spacecraft set down a total of twelve as- tronauts on the Moon; the last manned mission was that of Apollo 17, in December 1972. The first one was admittedly intended primarily to "beat the Russians to the Moon"; but the missions became increasingly scientific as the Apollo pro- gram progressed. The equipment for the tests and experiments became more sophisticated, the choice of landing sites was more scientifically oriented, the areas covered increased with the aid of surface vehicles, and the length of stay increased from hours to days. Even the crew makeup changed, to include in the last mission a trained geologist, Harrison Schmitt; his expertise was invaluable in the on-the-spot selection of rocks and soil to be taken back to Earth, in the description and evaluation of dust and other lunar materials left behind, and
Witness to Genesis 109
in the choice and description of topographic features—hills, valleys, small canyons, escarpments, and giant boulders (Plate D)—without which the true face of the Moon would have remained inscrutable. Instruments were left on the Moon to measure and record its phenomena over long periods; deeper soil samples were obtained by drilling into the face of the Moon; but most scientifically precious and rewarding were the 838 pounds of lunar soil and Moon rocks brought back to Earth. Their examination, analysis, and study were still in progress as the twentieth anniversary of the first landing was being celebrated.
The notion of "Genesis rocks" to be found on the Moon was proposed to NASA by the Nobel laureate Harold Urey. The so-called Genesis rock that was one of the very first to be picked up on the Moon proved, as the Apollo program pro- gressed, not to be the oldest one. It was "only" some 4.1 billion years old, whereas the rocks later found on the Moon ranged from 3.3 billion-year-old "youngsters" to 4.5 billion- year "old-timers." Barring a future discovery of somewhat older rocks, the oldest rocks found on the Moon have thus brought its age to within 100 million years of the estimated age of the Solar System—of 4,6 billion years—which until then was surmised only from the age of meteorites that struck the Earth.
The Moon, the lunar landings established, was a Witness to Genesis.
Establishing the age of the Moon, the time of its creation, intensified the debate concerning the question of how the Moon was created.
"The hope of establishing the Moon's origin was a primary scientific rationale for the manned landings of the Apollo proj- ect in the 1960s," James Gleick wrote in June 1986 for The New York Times Science Service. It was, however, "the great question that Apollo failed to answer."
How could modern science read an uneroded "Rosetta stone" of the Solar System, so close by, so much studied, landed upon six times—and not come up with an answer to the basic question? The answer to the puzzle seems to be that the findings were applied to a set of preconceived notions; and
110 GENESIS REVISITED
because none of these notions is correct, the findings appear to leave the question unanswered.
One of the earliest scientific theories regarding the Moon's origin was published in 1879 by Sir George H. Darwin, second son of Charles Darwin. Whereas his father put forth the theory regarding the origin of species on Earth, Sir George was the first to develop a theory of origins for the Sun-Earth-Moon system based on mathematical analysis and geophysical theory. His specialty was the study of tides; he therefore conceived of the Moon as having been formed from matter pulled off Earth by solar tides. The Pacific basin was later postulated to be the scar that remained after this "pinching off'' of part of Earth' s body to form the Moon.
Although, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it so mildly, it is "a hypothesis now considered unlikely to be true," the idea reappeared in the twentieth century as one of three con- tenders for being proved or disproved by the lunar findings. Given a high-tech name, the Fission Theory, it was revived with a difference. In the reconstructed theory, the simplistic idea of the tidal pull of the Sun was dropped; instead it was proposed that the Earth divided into two bodies while spinning very rapidly during its formation. The spinning was so rapid that a chunk of the material of which the Earth was forming was thrown off, coalesced at some distance from the bulk of the Earthly matter, and eventually remained orbiting its bigger twin brother as its permanent satellite (Fig. 39).
The "thrown-off chunk" theory, whether in its earlier or renewed form, has been conclusively rejected by scientists from various disciplines. Studies presented at the third Con- ference on the Origins of Life (held in Pacific Palisades, Cal- ifornia, in 1970) established that tidal forces as the cause of the fission could not account for the origin of the Moon beyond a distance of five Earth radii, whereas the Moon is some 60 Earth radii away from the Earth. Also, scientists consider a study by Kurt S. Hansen in 1982 (Review of Geophysics and Space Physics, vol. 20) as showing conclusively that the Moon could never have been closer to Earth than 140,000 miles; this would rule out any theory that the Moon was once part of Earth (the Moon is now an average distance of about 240,000 miles from Earth, but this distance has not been constant).
Witness to Genesis 111
Figure 39
Proponents of the Fission Theory have offered various var- iants thereof in order to overcome the distance problem, which is further constrained by a concept termed the Roche limit (the distance within which the tidal forces overcome the gravita- tional force). But all variants of the fission theory have been rejected because they violate the laws of the preservation of energy. The theory requires much more angular momentum than has been preserved in the energy that exists to spin the Earth and the Moon around their axes and to orbit around the Sun. Writing in the book Origin of (he Moon (1986), John A. Wood of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (" 'A Review of Hypotheses of Formation of Earth's Moon") summed up this constraint thus: "The fission model has very severe dynamic problems: In order to fission, the Earth had to have about four times as much angular momentum as the Earth- Moon system now has. There is no good explanation why the Earth had such an excess of angular momentum in the first
112 GENESIS REVISITED
place, or where the surplus angular momentum went after fis- sion occurred."
The knowledge about the Moon acquired from the Apollo program has added geologists and chemists to the lineup of scientists rejecting the fission theory. The Moon's composition is in many respects similar to that of Earth, yet different in key respects. There is sufficient "kinship" to indicate they are very close relatives, but there are enough differences to show they are not twin brothers. This is especially true of the Earth's crust and mantle, from which the Moon had to be formed, according to the fission theory. Thus, for example, the Moon has too little of the elements called "siderophile," such as tungsten, phosphorus, cobalt, molybdenum, and nickel, com- pared with the amount of these substances present in the Earth's mantle and crust; and too much of the "refractory" elements such as aluminum, calcium, titanium, and uranium. In a highly technical summary of the various findings ("The Origin of the Moon," American Scientist, September-October 1975), Stuart R. Taylor stated: "For all these reasons, it is difficult to match the composition of the bulk of the Moon to that of the terrestrial mantle."
The book Origin of the Moon, apart from its introductions and summaries (such as the above-mentioned article by J. A. Wood), is a collection of papers presented by sixty-two sci- entists at the Conference on the Origin of the Moon held at Kona, Hawaii, in October 1984—the most comprehensive since the conference twenty years earlier that had mapped out the scientific goals of the unmanned and manned Moon probes. In their papers, the contributing scientists, approaching the problem from various disciplines, invariably reached conclu- sions against the fission theory. Comparisons of the compo- sition of the upper mantle of the Earth with that of the Moon, Michael J. Drake of the University of Arizona stated, "rig- orously exclude" the Rotational Fission hypothesis.
The laws of angular momentum plus the comparisons of the composition of the Moon with that of Earth's mantle also ruled out, after the landings on the Moon, the second favored theory, that of Capture. According to this theory, the Moon was formed not near the Earth but among the outer planets or even beyond them. Somehow thrown off into a vast elliptical orbit around
Witness to Genesis 113
the Sun, it passed loo closely to the Earth, was caught by the Earth's gravitational force, and became Earth's satellite.
This theory, it was pointed out after numerous computer studies, required an extremely slow approach by the Moon toward the Earth. This capture process not unlike that of the satellites we have sent to be captured and remain in orbit around Mars or Venus, fails to take into account the relative sizes of Earth and Moon. Relative to the Earth, the Moon (about one- eightieth the mass of Earth) is much too large to have been snared from a vast elliptical orbit unless it was moving very slowly; but then, all the calculations have shown, the result would be not a capture but a collision. This theory was further laid to rest by comparisons of the compositions of the two celestial bodies: the Moon was too similar to Earth and too dissimilar to the outer bodies to have been born so far away from Earth.
Extensive studies of the Capture Theory suggested that the Moon would have remained intact only if it had neared Earth, not from way out, but from the very same part of the heavens where Earth itself was formed. This conclusion was accepted even by S. Fred Singer of George Mason University—a pro- ponent of the capture hypothesis—in his paper ("Origin of the Moon by Capture") presented at the above-mentioned Con- ference on the Origin of the Moon. "Capture from an eccentric heliocentric orbit is neither feasible nor necessary," he stated; the oddities in the Moon's composition "can be explained in terms of a Moon formed in an Earthlike orbit": the Moon was "captured" while forming near Earth.
These admissions by proponents of the fission and the cap- ture theories lent support to the third main theory that was previously current, that of Coaccretion, a common birth. This theory has its roots in the hypothesis proposed at the end of the eighteenth century by Pierre-Simon de Laplace, who said that the Solar System was born of a nebular gas cloud that coalesced in time to form the Sun and the planets—a hypothesis that has been retained by modern science. Showing that lunar accelerations are dependent on eccentricities in the Earth's orbit, Laplace concluded that the two bodies were formed side by side, first the Earth and then the Moon. The Earth and the Moon, he suggested, were sister planets, partners in a binary,
114 GENESIS REVISITED
or two-planet, system, in which they orbit the Sun together while one "dances" around the other.
That natural satellites, or moons, coalesce from the remain- der of the same primordial matter of which their parent planet was formed is now the generally accepted theory of how planets acquired moons and should also apply to Earth and the Moon. As has been found by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, the moons of the outer planets—that had to be formed, by and large, out of the same primordial material as their "parents"— are both sufficiently akin to their parent planets and at the same time reveal individual characteristics as "children" do; this might well be true also for the basic similarities and sufficient dissimilarities between the Earth and the Moon.
What nevertheless makes scientists reject this theory when it is applied to the Earth and the Moon is their relative sizes. The Moon is simply too large relative to the Earth—not only about one-eightieth of its mass but about one quarter of its diameter. This relationship is out of all proportion to what has been found elsewhere in the Solar System. When the mass of all the moons of each planet (excluding Pluto) is given as a ratio of the planet's mass, the result is as follows:
Mercury 0.0 (no moons)
Venus 0.0 (no moons)
EARTH 0.0122
Mars 0.00000002 (2 asteroids) Jupiter 0.00021
Saturn 0.00025 Uranus 0.00017 Neptune 0.00130
Mercury 0.0 (no moons)
Venus 0.0 (no moons)
EARTH 0.0122
Mars 0.00000002 (2 asteroids) Jupiter 0.00021
Saturn 0.00025 Uranus 0.00017 Neptune 0.00130
A comparison of the relative sizes of the largest moon of each of the other planets with the size of the Moon relative to Earth (Fig. 40) also clearly shows the anomaly. One result of this disproportion is that there is too much angular momentum in the combined Earth-Moon system to support the Binary Planets hypothesis.
With all three basic theories unable to meet some of the required criteria, one may end up wondering how Earth ended up with its satellite at all. . . Such a conclusion, in fact, does
Witness to Genesis 115
Figure 40
not bother some; they point to the fact that none of the terrestrial planets (other than Earth) have satellites: the two tiny bodies that orbit Mars are, all are agreed, captured asteroids. If con- ditions in the Solar System were such that none of the planets formed between the Sun and Mars (inclusive) obtained satel- lites in any one of the considered methods—Fission, Capture, Coaccretion—should not Earth, too, being within this moon- less zone, have been without a moon? But the fact remains that Earth as we know it and where we know it does have a moon, and an extremely large one (in proportion) to boot. So how to account tor that?
Another finding of the Apollo program also stands in the way of accepting the coaccretion theory. The Moon's surface as well as its mineral content suggest a "magma ocean'' created by partial melting of the Moon's interior. For that, a source of heat great enough to melt the magma is called for. Such heat can result only from cataclysmic or catastrophic event; in the coaccretion scenario no such heat is produced. How then explain the magma ocean and other evidence on the Moon of a cataclysmic heating?
116 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 41
The need for a birth of the Moon with the right amount of angular momentum and a cataclysmic, heat-producing event led to a post-Apollo program hypothesis that has been dubbed the Big Whack Theory. It developed from the suggestion by William Hartmann, a geochemist at the Planetary Science In- stitute in Tucson, Arizona, and his colleague Donald R. Davis in 1975 that collisions and impacts played a role in the creation of the Moon ("Satellite-sized Planetesimals and Lunar Ori- gin," Icarus, vol. 24). According to their calculations, the rate at which planets were bombarded by small and large asteroids during the late stages of the planets' formation was much higher than at present; some of the asteroids were big enough to deliver a blow that could chip off parts of the planet they hit; in Earth's case, the blown-off chunk became the Moon.
The idea was taken up by two astrophysicists, Alastair G. W. Cameron of Harvard and William R. Ward of Caltech. Their study, "The Origin of the Moon" (Lunar Science, vol. 7, 1976) envisioned a planet-sized body—at least as large as the planet Mars—racing toward the Earth at 24,500 miles per hour; coming from the outer reaches of the Solar System, its path arced toward the Sun—but the Earth, in its formative orbit, stood in the way. The "glancing blow" that resulted (Fig. 41) slightly tilted the Earth, giving it its ecliptic obliquity (currently about 23.5 degrees); it also melted the outer layers of both bodies, sending a plume of vaporized rock into orbit around the Earth. More than twice as much material as was needed
Witness to Genesis 117
to form the Moon was shot up, with the force of the expanding vapor acting to distance the debris from Earth. Some of the ejected material fell back to Earth, but enough remained far enough away to eventually coalesce and become the Moon.
This Collision-Ejection theory was further perfected by its authors as various problems raised by it were pointed out; it was also modified as other scientific teams tested it through computer simulations (the leading teams were those of A. C. Thompson and D. Stevenson at Caltech, H. J. Melosh and M. Kipp at Sandia National Laboratories, and W. Benz and W. L. Slattery at Los Alamos National Laboratory).
Under this scenario (Fig. 42 shows a simulated sequence,
Figure 42
118 GENESIS REVISITED
lasting about eighteen minutes in all), the impact resulted in immense heat (perhaps 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit) that caused a melting of both bodies. The bulk of the impactor sank to the center of the molten Earth; portions of both bodies were va- porized and thrust out. On cooling, the Earth re-formed with the iron-rich bulk of the impactor at its core. Some of the ejected material fell back to Earth; the rest, mostly from the impactor, cooled and coalesced at a distance—resulting in the Moon that now orbits the Earth.
Another major departure from the original Big Whack hy- pothesis was the realization that in order to resolve chemical composition constraints, the impactor had to come from the same place in the heavens as Earth itself did—not from the outer regions of the Solar System. But if so, where and how did it acquire the immense momentum it needed for the va- porizing impact?
There is also the question of plausibility, which Cameron himself recognized in his presentation at the Hawaii con- ference. "Is it plausible," he asked, "that an extra- planetary body with about the mass of Mars or more should have been wandering around in the inner solar system at an appropriate time to have participated in our postulated colli- sion?" He felt that about 100 million years after the planets were formed, there were indeed enough planetary instabilities in the newborn Solar System and enough "proto- planetary remnants" to make the existence of a large impactor and the postulated collision plausible.
Subsequent calculations showed that in order to achieve the end results, the impactor had to be three times the size of Mars. This heightened the problem of where and how in Earth's vicinity such a celestial body could accrete. In response, as- tronomer George Wetherill of the Carnegie Institute calculated backward and found that the terrestrial planets could have evolved from a roaming band of some five hundred planetes- imals. Repeatedly colliding among themselves, the small moonlets acted as the building blocks of the planets and of the bodies that continued to bombard them. The calculations sup- ported the plausibility of the Big Whack theory in its modified Collision-Ejection scenario, but it retained the resulting im- mense heat. "The heat of such an impact," Wetherill con-
Witness to Genesis 119
cluded, "would have melted both bodies." This, it seemed, could explain a) how the Earth got its iron core and b) how the Moon got its molten magma oceans.
Although this latest version left many other constraints un- met, many of the participants in the 1984 Conference on the Origin of the Moon were ready, by the time the conference ended, to treat the collision-ejection hypothesis as the leading contender—not so much out of conviction of its correctness as out of exasperation. "This happened," Wood wrote in his summary, "mainly because several independent investigators showed that coaccretion, the model that had been most widely accepted by lunar scientists (at least at a subconscious level), could not account for the angular momentum content of the Earth-Moon system." In fact, some of the participants at the conference, including Wood himself, saw vexing problems inherent in the new theory. Iron, Wood pointed out, "is ac- tually quite volatile and would have suffered much the same fate as the other volatiles, like sodium and water"; in other words, it would not have sunk intact into the Earth's core as the theory postulates. The abundance of water on Earth, to say nothing of the abundance of iron in the Earth's mantle, would not have been possible if Earth had melted down.
Since each variant of the Big Whack hypothesis involved a total meltdown of the Earth, it was necessary that other evi- dence of such a meltdown be found. But as was overwhelm- ingly reported at the 1988 Origin of the Earth Conference at Berkeley, California, no such evidence exists. If Earth had melted and resolidified, various elements in its rocks would have crystallized differently from the way they actually are found, and they would have reappeared in certain ratios, but this is not the case. Another result should have been the dis- tortion of the chondrite material—the most primordial matter on Earth that is also found in the most primitive meteorites— but no such distortion has been found. One investigator, A. E. Ringwood of the Australian National University, extended these tests to more than a dozen elements whose relative abun- dance should have been altered had the first crust of Earth been formed after an Earth meltdown; but there was no such alter- ation to any significant extent. In a review of these findings in Science (March 17, 1989) it was pointed out that at the 1988
120 GENESIS REVISITED
conference the geochemists "contended that a giant impact and its inevitable melting of Earth do not jibe with what they know of geochemistry. In particular, the composition of the upper few hundred kilometers of the mantle implies it has not been totally molten at any time." "Geochemistry," the authors of the article in Science concluded, "would thus seem to be a potential stumbling block for the giant-impact origin of the moon." In "Science and Technology," (The Economist, July 22, 1989) it was likewise reported that numerous studies have led geochemists "to be skeptical about the impact story."
Like the previous theories, the Big Whack also ended up meeting some constraints but failing others. Still, one should ask whether, while this theory of impact-meltdown ran into problems when applied to Earth, did it not at least solve the problem of the melting that is evident on the Moon?
As it turned out, not exactly so. Thermal studies did, indeed, indicate the Moon had experienced a great meltdown. "The indications are that the Moon was largely or totally molten early in lunar history," Alan B. Binder of NASA's Johnson Space Center said at the 1984 Conference on the Origin of the Moon. "Early," but not "initial," countered other scientists. This crucial difference was based on studies of stresses in the Moon's crust (by Sean C. Solomon of the Massachusetts In- stitute of Technology), as well of isotope ratios (when atomic nuclei of the same element have different masses because they have different numbers of neutrons) studied by D. L. Turcotte and L. H. Kellog of Cornell University. These studies, the 1984 conference was told, "support a relatively cool origin for the Moon."
What, then, of the evidence of meltings on the Moon? There is no doubt that they have occurred: the giant craters, some a hundred or more miles in diameter, are silent witnesses visible to all. There are the maria ("seas"), that, it is now known, were not bodies of water but areas of the Moon's surface flattened by immense impacts. There are the magma oceans. There are glass and glassy material embedded in the rocks and grains of the Moon's surface that resulted from shock melting of the surface caused by high-velocity impacts (as distinct from heated lava as a source). At the third Conference on the Origins of Life, a whole day was devoted to the subject of "Glass on
Witness to Genesis 121
the Moon," so important was this clue held to be. Eugene Shoemaker of NASA and Caltech reported that such evidence of "shock vitrified" glasses and other types of melted rock were found in abundance on the Moon; the presence of nickel in the glassy spheres and beads suggested to him that the impactor had a composition different from that of the Moon, since the Moon's own rocks lack nickel.
When did all these impacts that caused the surface melting take place? Not, the findings showed, when the Moon was created but some 500 million years afterward. It was then. NASA scientists reported at a 1972 press conference and sub- sequently, that "the Moon had undergone a convulsive evo- lution. . . . The most cataclysmic period came 4 billion years ago, when celestial bodies the size of large cities and small countries came crashing into the Moon and formed its huge basins and towering mountains. The huge amounts of radio- active minerals left by the collisions began heating the rock beneath the surface, melting massive amounts of it and forcing seas of lava through cracks in the surface. . . . Apollo 15 found rockslides in the crater Tsiolovsky six times greater than any rockslide on Earth. Apollo 16 discovered that the collision that created the Sea of Nectar deposited debris as much as 1,000 miles away. Apollo 17 landed near a scarp eight times higher than any on Earth."
The oldest rocks on the Moon were judged to be 4.25 billion years old; soil particles gave a date of 4.6 billion years. The age of the Moon, all 1,500 or so scientists who have studied the rocks and soil brought back agree, dates back to the time the Solar System first took shape. But then something happened about 4 billion years ago. Writing in Scientific American (Jan- uary 1977), William Hartmann, in his article "Cratering in the Solar System," reported that "various Apollo analysts have found that the age of many samples of lunar rocks cuts off rather sharply at four billion years; few older rocks have sur- vived." The rocks and soil samples that contained the glasses formed by the intense impacts were as old as 3.9 billion years. "We know that a widespread cataclysmic episode of intense bombardment destroyed older rocks and surfaces of the planets," Gerald J. Wasserburg of Caltech stated on the eve of the last Apollo mission; the remaining question, then, was
122 GENESIS REVISITED
"what happened between the origin of the Moon about 4.6 billion years ago and 4 billion years ago," when the catastrophe occurred.
So the rock found by astronaut David Scott that was nick- named "the Genesis Rock" was not formed at the time the Moon was formed, it was actually formed as a result of that catastrophic event some 600 million years later. Even so, it was appropriately named; for the tale in Genesis is not that of the primordial forming of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago, but of the Celestial Battle of Nibiru/Marduk with Tiamat some 4 billion years ago.
Unhappy with all the theories that have so far been offered for the origin of the Moon, some have attempted to select the best one by grading the theories according to certain constraints and criteria. A "Truth Table" prepared by Michael J. Drake of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory had the Coaccretion theory far ahead of all others. In John A. Wood's analysis it met all the criteria except that of the Earth- Moon angular momentum and the melting on the Moon; oth- erwise it bettered all others. The consensus has now focused again on the Coaccretion theory, with some elements borrowed from the Giant Impact and Fission theories. According to the theory offered at the 1984 Conference by A. P. Boss of the Carnegie Institute and S. J. Peale of the University of Cali- fornia, the Moon is indeed seen as coaccreting with Earth from the same primoridal matter, but the gas cloud within which the coaccretion took place was subjected to bombardments by pla- netesimals, which sometimes disintegrated the forming Moon and sometimes added foreign material to its mass (Fig. 43). The net result was an ever-larger Moon attracting and absorbing other moonlets that were forming within the circumterrestrial ring—a Moon both akin to and somewhat different from the Earth.
Having swung from theory to theory, modern science now embraces as a theory for the origin of our Moon the same process that gave the outer planets their multimoon systems. The hurdle still to be overcome is the need to explain why, instead of a swarm of smaller moons, a too-small Earth has ended up with a single, too-large Moon.
Witness to Genesis 123
Figure 43
For the answer, we have to go back to Sumerian cosmogony. The first help it offers modern science is its assertion that the Moon originated not as a satellite of Earth but of the much larger Tiamat. Then—millennia before Western civilization had discovered the swarms of moons encircling Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—the Sumerians ascribed to Tiamat a swarm of satellites, "eleven in all." They placed Tiamat be- yond Mars, which would qualify her as an outer planet; and the "celestial horde" was acquired by her no differently than by the other outer planets.
When we compare the latest scientific theories with Sumer- ian cosmogony, we find not only that modern scientists have come around to accepting the same ideas found in the Sumerian body of knowledge but are even using terminology that mimics the Sumerian texts. . . .
Just as the latest modern theories do, the Sumerian cos- mogony also describes the scene as that of an early, unstable Solar System where planetesimals and emerging gravitational forces disturb the planetary balance and, sometimes, cause moons to grow disproportionately. In The 12th Planet, I de- scribed the celestial conditions thus: "With the end of the
124 GENESIS REVISITED
majestic drama of the birth of the planets, the authors of the Creation Epic now raise the curtain on Act II, on a drama of celestial turmoil. The newly created family of planets was far from being stable. The planets were gravitating toward each other; they were converging on Tiamat, disturbing and endan- gering the primordial bodies." In the poetic words of the En- uma elish,
The divine brothers banded together;
They disturbed Tiamat as they surged back and forth. They were troubling the belly of Tiamat
by their antics in the dwellings of heaven.
Apsu [the Sun] could not lessen their clamor;
Tiamat was speechless at their ways.
Their doings were loathsome . . .
Troublesome were their ways;
they were overbearing.
"We have here obvious references to erratic orbits," I wrote in The 12th Planet. The new planets "surged back and forth"; they got too close to each other ("banded together"); they interfered with Tiamat's orbit; they got too close to her "belly"; their "ways"—orbits—"were troublesome"; their gravitational pull was "overbearing"—excessive, disregard- ing the others' orbits.
Abandoning earlier concepts of a Solar System slowly cool- ing and gradually freezing into its present shape out of the hot primordial cloud, scientific opinion has now swung in the op- posite direction. "As faster computers allow celestial me- chanicians longer looks at the behavior of the planets,'' Richard A. Kerr wrote in Science ("Research News," April 14, 1989), "chaos is turning up everywhere." He quoted such studies as that by Gerald J. Sussman and Jack Wisdom of the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology in which they went back by computer simulations and discovered that "many orbits that lie between Uranus and Neptune become chaotic," and that "the orbital behavior of Pluto is chaotic and unpredictable." J. Laskar of the Bureau des Longitudes in Paris found original chaos throughout the Solar System, "but especially among the inner planets, including Earth."
Witness to Genesis 125
George Wetherill, updating his calculations of multicolli- sions by some five hundred planetesimals (Science, May 17, 1985), described the process in the zone of the terrestrial planets as the accretion of "lots of brothers and sisters" that collided to form "trial planets." The process of accretion—crashing into one another, breaking up, capturing the material of others, until some grew larger and eventually became the terrestrial planets—he said, was nothing short of a "battle royal" that lasted most of the first 100 million years of the Solar System.
The eminent scientist's words are astoundingly similar to those of the Enutna elish. He speaks of "lots of brothers and sisters" moving about, colliding with each other, affecting each other's orbits and very existence. The ancient text speaks of "divine brothers" who "disturbed," "troubled," "surged back and forth" in the heavens in the very zone where Tiamat was, near her "belly." He uses the expression "battle royal" to describe the conflict between these "brothers and sisters." The Sumerian narrative uses the very same word—"battle"—- to describe what happened, and recorded for all time the events of Genesis as the Celestial Battle.
We read in the ancient texts that as the celestial disturbances increased, Tiamat brought forth her own "host" with which "to do battle" with the celestial "brothers" who were en- croaching on her:
She has set up an Assembly
and is furious with rage. . . .
Withall, eleven of this kind she brought forth. . . .
They thronged and marched at the side of Tiamat; Enraged, they plot ceaselessly day and night. They are set for combat, fuming and raging; They have assembled, prepared for conflict.
Just as modern astronomers are troubled by the dispropor- tionately large size of the Moon, so were the authors of the Enuma elish. Putting words in the mouths of the other planets, they point to the expanding size and disturbing mass of "Kingu" as their chief complaint:
GENESIS REVISITED
From among the gods who formed her host
her first-born, Kingu, she elevated;
In their midst she made him great.
To be head of her ranks, to command her host, to raise weapons for the encounter,
to be in the lead for combat,
in the battle to be the commander--
these to the hand of Kingu she entrusted.
As she caused him to be in her host,
"I have cast a spell for thee," she said to him;
"I have made thee great in the assembly of the gods; Dominion over the gods I have given unto thee. Verily, thou art supreme!"
According to this ancient cosmogony, one of the eleven moons of Tiamat did grow to an unusual size because of the ongoing perturbations and chaotic conditions in the newly formed Solar System. How the creation of this monstrous moon affected these conditions is regrettably not clear from the an- cient text; the enigmatic verses, with some of the original words subject to different readings and translations, seem to say that making Kingu "exalted" resulted in "making the fire subside" (per E. A. Speiser), or "quieting the fire-god" (per A. Heidel) and humbling /vanquishing the "Power-weapon which is so potent in its sweep"—a possible reference to the disturbing pull of gravitation.
Whatever quieting effect the enlargement of "Kingu" may have had on Tiamat and her host, it proved increasingly dis- ruptive to the other planets. Especially disturbing to them was the elevation of Kingu to the status of a full-fledged planet:
She gave him a Tablet of Destinies, fastened it on his breast. . . .
Kingu was elevated,
had received a heavenly rank.
It was this "sin" of Tiamat, her giving Kingu his own orbital "destiny," that enraged the other planets to the point of "call- ing in" Nibiru/Marduk to put an end to Tiamat and her out- of-line consort. In the ensuing Celestial Battle, as described
126
Witness to Genesis 127
earlier, Tiamat was split in two: one half was shattered; the other half, accompanied by Kingu, was thrust into a new orbit to become the Earth and its Moon.
We have here a sequence that conforms with the best points of the various modern theories regarding the origin, evolution, and final fate of the Moon. Though the nature of the "power- weapon . . . so potent in its sweep" or that of "the fire-god" that caused Kingu to grow disproportionately large remains unclear, the fact of the disproportionate size of the Moon (even relative to the larger Tiamat) is recorded in all its disturbing details. All is there-—except that it is not Sumerian cosmogony that corroborates modern science, but modern science that catches up with ancient knowledge.
Could the Moon have indeed been a planet-in-the- making, as the Sumerians said? As reviewed in earlier chapters, this was quite conceivable. Did it in fact assume planetary aspects? Contrary to long-held views that the Moon was always an inert object, it was found, in the 1970s and 1980s, to possess virtually all the attributes of a planet except its own independent orbit around the Sun. Its surface has regions of rugged and tangled mountains; it has plains and "seas" that, if not formed by water, were probably formed by molten lava. To the sci- entists' surprise the Moon was found to be layered, as the Earth is. In spite of the depletion of its iron by the catastrophic event discussed earlier, it appears to have retained an iron core. Scientists debate whether the core is still molten, for to their astonishment the Moon was found to have once possessed a magnetic field, which is caused by the rotation of a molten iron core, as is true of the Earth and other planets. Significantly, as studies by Keith Runcorn of Britain's University of New- castle-upon-Tyne indicate, the magnetism "dwindled away circa four billion years ago"-—the time of the Celestial Battle.
Instruments installed on the Moon by Apollo astronauts re- layed data that revealed "unexpectedly high heat flows from beneath the lunar surface," indicating ongoing activity inside the "lifeless orb." Vapor—water vapor—was detected by Rice University scientists, who reported (in October 1971) seeing "geysers of water vapor erupting through cracks in the lunar surface.'' Other unexpected findings reported at the Third Lunar Science Conference in Houston in 1972 disclosed on-
128 GENESIS REVISITED
going volcanism on the Moon, which "'would imply the si- multaneous existence near the lunar surface of significant quantities of heat and water."
In 1973, "bright flashes" sighted on the Moon were found to be emissions of gas from the Moon's interior. Reporting this, Walter Sullivan, science editor of The New York Times, observed that it appeared that the Moon, even if not a "living celestial body... is at least a breathing one," Such puffs of gas and darkish mists have been observed in several of the Moon's deep craters from the very first Apollo mission and at least through 1980.
The indications that lunar volcanism may still be going on have led scientists to assume that the Moon once had a full- fledged atmosphere whose volatile elements and compounds included hydrogen, helium, argon, sulfur, carbon compounds, and water. The possibility that there may still be water below the Moon's surface has raised the intriguing question of whether water once flowed on the face of the Moon—water that, as a very volatile compound, evaporated and was dissi- pated into space.
Were it not for budgetary constraints, NASA would have been willing to adopt the recommendations of a panel of sci- entists to explore the Moon with a view to begin mining its mineral resources. Thirty geologists, chemists, and physicists who met in August 1977 at the University of California in San Diego pointed out that research on the Moon—both from orbit and on its surface—had been limited to its equatorial regions; they urged the launching of a lunar polar orbiter, not only because such an orbiter could collect data from the entire Moon, but also with a view to discovering if there is now water on the Moon. "One target of the orbiter's observations," ac- cording to James Arnold of the University of California, "would be small areas near each pole where the Sun never shines. It has been theorized by scientists that as much as 100 billion tons of water in the form of ice are likely to be found in those places. ... If you're going to have large-scale activities in space, like mining and manufacturing, it's going to involve a lot of water, the Moon's polar regions could be a good source."
Whether the Moon still has water, after all the cataclysmic
Witness to Genesis 129
events it has undergone, is still to be ascertained. But the increasing evidence that it may still have water in its interior and may have had water on its surface should not be surprising. After all, the Moon—alias Kingu—was the leading satellite of the "watery monster" Tiamat.
On the occasion of the last Apollo mission to the Moon, The Economist (Science and Technology, December 11,1972) summed up the program's discoveries thus: "Perhaps the most important of all, exploration of the moon has shown that it is not a simple, uncomplicated sphere but a true planetary body.''
"A true planetary body." Just as the Sumerians described millennia ago. And just as they stated millennia ago, the planet- to-be was not to become a planet with its own orbit around the Sun because it was deprived of that status as a result of the Celestial Battle. Here is what Nibiru/Marduk did to "Kingu":
And Kingu, who had become chief among them,
he made shrink, as a DUG.GA.E god he counted him. He took from him the Tablet of Destinies
which was not rightfully his;
He sealed on it his own seal
and fastened it to his own breast.
Deprived of its orbital momentum, Kingu was reduced to the status of a mere satellite—our Moon.
The Sumerian observation that Nibiru/Marduk made Kingu "shrink" has been taken to refer to its reduction in rank and importance. But as recent findings indicate, the Moon has been depleted of the bulk of its iron by a cataclysmic event, resulting in a marked decrease in its density. "There are two planetary bodies within the Solar System whose peculiar mean density implies that they are unique and probably the products of un- usual circumstances," Alastair Cameron wrote in Icarus (vol. 64, 1985); "these are the Moon and Mercury. The former has a low mean density and is greatly depleted in iron." In other words, Kingu has indeed shrunk!
There is other evidence that the Moon became more compact as a result of heavy impacts. On the side facing away from Earth-—its far side—the surface has highlands and a thick
130 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 44
crust, while the near side—-the side facing Earth—shows large, flat plains, as though the elevated features had been wiped off. Inside the Moon, gravitational variations reveal the existence of compacted, heavier masses in several concentrations, es- pecially where the surface had been flattened out. Though outwardly the Moon (as do all celestial bodies larger than a minimal size) has a spherical shape, the mass in its core appears to have the shape of a gourd, as a computer study shows (Fig. 44). It is a shape that bears the mark of the "big whack" that compressed the Moon and thrust it into its new place in the heavens, just as the Sumerians had related.
The Sumerian assertion that Kingu was turned into a DUG.GA.E is equally intriguing. The term, I wrote in The 12th Planet, literally means "pot of lead." At the time I took it to be merely a figurative description of the Moon as " a mass of lifeless clay." But the Apollo discoveries suggest that the Sumerian term was not just figurative but was literally and scientifically correct. One of the initial puzzles encountered on the Moon was so-called "parentless lead." The Apollo pro-
Witness to Genesis 131
gram revealed that the top few miles of the Moon's crust are unusually rich in radioactive elements such as uranium. There was also evidence of the existence of extinct radon. These elements decay and become lead at either final or intermediary stages of the radioactive-decay process.
How the Moon became so enriched in radioactive elements remains an unresolved puzzle, but that these elements had mostly decayed into lead is now evident. Thus, the Sumerian assertion that Kingu was turned into a "pot of lead" is an accurate scientific statement.
The Moon was not only a Witness to Genesis. It is also a witness to the veracity of the biblical Genesis—to the accuracy of ancient knowledge.
132 GENESIS REVISITED
IN THE ASTRONAUTS' OWN WORDS
Feeling changes of "almost a spiritual nature" in their views of themselves, of other humans, and of the possibility of intelligent life existing beyond Earth have been reported by almost all the American astronauts.
Gordon Cooper, who piloted Mercury 9 in 1963 and co- piloted Gemini 5 in 1965, returned with the belief that "in- telligent, extraterrestrial life has visited Earth in ages past" and became interested in archaeology. Edward G. Gibson, a scientist aboard Skylab 3 (1974), said that orbiting the Earth for days "makes you speculate a little more about life existing elsewhere in the universe."
Especially moved were the astronauts of the Apollo mis- sions to the Moon. "Something happens to you out there," stated Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell. Jim Irwin fApollo 15) was "deeply moved ... and felt the presence of God." His comrade on the mission, Al Worden, speaking on the twentieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon on a TV program ("The Other Side of the Moon" produced by Michael G. Lemle) compared the lunar module that was used to land on and take off vertically from the Moon to the spaceship described in Ezekiel's vision.
"In my mind," said Al Worden, "the universe has to be cyclic; in one galaxy there is a planet becoming unlivable and in another part or a different galaxy there is a planet that is perfect for habitation, and I see some intelligent being, like us, skipping around from planet to planet, as South Pacific Indians do on islands, to continue the species. I think that's what the space program is all about. ... 1 think we may be a combination of creatures that were living here on Earth some time in the past, and had a visitation by beings from somewhere else in the universe; and those two species getting together and having progeny. . . . In fact, a very small group of explorers could land on a planet and create successors to themselves who would eventually take up the pursuit of inhabiting the rest of the universe,"
And Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11) expressed the belief that "one of these days, through telescopes that may be in orbit, like the Hubble telescope, or other technical breakthroughs, we may learn that indeed we are not alone in this marvelous
7
THE SEED OF LIFE
Of all the mysteries confronting Mankind's quest for knowl- edge, the greatest is the mystery called "life."
Evolution theory explains how life on Earth evolved, all the way from the earliest, one-celled creatures to Homo sapiens; it does not explain how life on Earth began. Beyond the ques- tion, Are we alone? lies the more fundamental question: Is life on Earth unique, unmatched in our Solar System, our galaxy, the whole universe?
According to the Sumerians, life was brought into the Solar System by Nibiru; it was Nibiru that imparted the "seed of life" to Earth during the Celestial Battle with Tiamat. Modern science has come a long way toward the same conclusion.
In order to figure out how life might have begun on the primitive Earth, the scientists had to determine, or at least assume, what the conditions were on the newly born Earth. Did it have water? Did it have an atmosphere? What of life's main building blocks—molecular combinations of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus? Were they available on the young Earth to initiate the precursors of living organisms? At present the Earth's dry air is made up of 79 percent nitrogen (N2), 20 percent oxygen (O2) and 1 percent argon (Ar), plus traces of other elements (the atmosphere con- tains water vapor in addition to the dry air). This docs not reflect the relative abundance of elements in the universe, where hydrogen (87 percent) and helium (12 percent) make up 99 percent of all abundant elements. It is therefore believed (among other reasons) that the present earthly atmosphere is not Earth's original one. Both hydrogen and helium are highly volatile, and their diminished presence in Earth's atmosphere, as well as its deficiency of "noble" gases such as neon, argon,
133
134 GENESIS REVISITED
krypton, and xenon (relative to their cosmic abundance), sug- gest to scientists that the Earth experienced a "thermal epi- sode" sometime before 3.8 billion years ago—an occurrence with which my readers are familiar by now. . . .
By and large the scientists now believe that Earth's atmo- sphere was reconstituted initially from the gases spewed out by the volcanic convulsions of a wounded Earth. As clouds thrown up by these eruptions shielded the Earth and it began to cool, the vaporized water condensed and came down in torrential rains. Oxidation of rocks and minerals provided the first reservoir of higher levels of oxygen on Earth; eventually, plant life added both oxygen and carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere and started the nitrogen cycle (with the aid of bacteria).
It is noteworthy that even in this respect the ancient texts stand up to the scrutiny of modern science. The fifth tablet of Enutna elish, though badly damaged, describes the gushing lava as Tiamat's "spittle" and places the volcanic activity earlier than the formation of the atmosphere, the oceans, and the continents. The spittle, the text states, was "laying in layers" as it poured forth. The phase of "making the cold" and the "assembling of the water clouds" are described; after that the "foundations" of Earth were raised and the oceans were gathered—just as the verses in Genesis have reiterated. It was only thereafter that life appeared on Earth: green herbage upon the continents and '"swarms" in the waters.
But living cells, even the simplest ones, are made up of complex molecules of various organic compounds, not just of separate chemical elements. How did these molecules come about? Because many of these compounds have been found elsewhere in the Solar System, it has been assumed that they form naturally, given enough time. In 1953 two scientists at the University of Chicago, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller, conducted what has since been called "a most striking exper- iment." In a pressure vessel they mixed simple organic mol- ecules of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor, dissolved the mixture in water to simulate the primordial watery "soup," and subjected the mixture to electrical sparks to em- ulate primordial lightning bolts. The experiment produced sev- eral amino and hydroxy acids—the building blocks of proteins.
The Seed of Life 135
which are essential to living matter. Other researchers later subjected similar mixtures to ultraviolet light, ionizing radia- tion, or heat to simulate the effects of the Sun's rays as well as various other types of radiation on the Earth's primitive atmosphere and murky waters. The results were the same.
But it was one thing to show that nature itself could, under certain conditions, come up with life's building blocks—not just simple but even complex organic compounds; it was an- other thing to breathe life into the resulting compounds, which remained inert and lifeless in the compression chambers. "Life" is defined as the ability to absorb nutrients (of any kind) and to replicate, not just to exist. Even the biblical tale of Creation recognizes that when the most complex being on Earth, Man, was shaped out of "clay," divine intervention was needed to "breathe the spirit/breath of life" into him. Without that, no matter how ingeniously created, he was not yet animate, not yet living.
As astronomy has done in the celestial realm, so, in the 1970s and 1980s, did biochemistry unlock many of the secrets of terrestrial life. The innermost reaches of living cells have been pried open, the genetic code that governs replication has been understood, and many of the complex components that make the tiniest one-celled being or the cells of the most ad- vanced creatures have been synthesized. Pursuing the research, Stanley Miller, now at the University of California at San Diego, has commented that "we have learned how to make organic compounds from inorganic elements; the next step is to learn how they organize themselves into a replicating cell."
The murky-waters, or "primordial-soup," hypothesis for the origin of life on Earth envisions a multitude of those earliest organic molecules in the ocean, bumping into each other as the result of waves, currents, or temperature changes, and eventually sticking to one another through natural cell attrac- tions to form cell groupings from which polymers—long- chained molecules that lie at the core of body formation— eventually developed. But what gave these cells the genetic memory to know, not just how to combine, but how to rep- licate, to make the ultimate bodies grow? The need to involve ihe genetic code in the transition from inanimate organic matter to an animate state has led to a "Made-of-Clay" hypothesis.
136 GENESIS REVISITED
The launching of this theory is attributed to an announcement in April 1985 by researchers at the Ames Research Center, a NASA facility at Mountainview, California; but in fact the idea that clay on the shores of ancient seas played an important role in the origin of life on Earth was made public at the October 1977 Pacific Conference on Chemistry. There James A. Law- less, who headed a team of researchers at NASA's Ames fa- cility, reported on experiments in which simple amino acids (the chemical building blocks of proteins) and nucleotides (the chemical building blocks of genes)—assuming they had al- ready developed in the murky "primordial soup" in the sea— began to form into chains when deposited on clays that con- tained traces of metals such as nickel or zinc, and allowed to dry.
What the researchers found to be significant was that the traces of nickel selectively held on only to the twenty kinds of amino acids that are common to all living things on Earth, while the traces of zinc in the clay helped link together the nucleotides, which resulted in a compound analogous to a crucial enzyme (called DNA-polymerase) that links pieces of genetic material in all living cells.
In 1985 the scientists of the Ames Research Center reported substantial advances in understanding the role of clay in the processes that had led to life on Earth. Clay, they discovered, has two basic properties essential to life: the capacity to store and the ability to transfer energy. In the primordial conditions such energy might have come from radioactive decay, among other possible sources. Using the stored energy, clays might have acted as chemical laboratories where inorganic raw ma- tefials were processed into more complex molecules. There was more: one scientist, Armin Weiss of the University of Munich, reported experiments in which clay crystals seemed to reproduce themselves from a "parent crystal"—a primitive replication phenomenon; and Graham Cairns-Smith of the Uni- versity of Glasgow held that the inorganic "proto-organisms" in the clay were involved in "directing" or actually acting as a "template" from which the living organisms eventually evolved.
Explaining these tantalizing properties of clay-—even com- mon clay—Lelia Coyne, who headed one research team, said
The Seed of Life 137
that the ability of the clays to trap and transmit energy was due to "mistakes" in the formation of clay crystals; these defects in the clays' microstructure acted as the sites where energy was stored and from which the chemical directions for the formation of the proto-organisms emanated.
"If the theory can be confirmed," The New York Times commented in its report of the announcements, "it would seem that an accumulation of chemical mistakes led to life on Earth.'' So the "life-from-clay" theory, in spite of the advances it offered, depended, as the "murky-soup" theory did, on ran- dom occurrences—microstructural mistakes here, occasional lightning strikes and collisions of molecules there—to explain the transition from chemical elements to simple organic mol- ecules to complex organic molecules and from inanimate to animate matter.
The improved theory seemed to do another thing, which did not escape notice. "The theory," The New York Times con- tinued, "is also evocative of the biblical account of the Cre- ation. In Genesis it is written, 'And the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground,' and in common usage the primordial dust is called clay." This news story, and the bib- lical parallel implicit in it, merited an editorial in the venerable newspaper. Under the headline "Uncommon Clay," the edi- torial said:
Ordinary clay, it seems, has two basic properties essential to life. It can store energy and also transmit it. So, the scientists reason, clay could have acted as a "chemical factory" for turning inorganic raw materials into more complex molecules. Out of those complex molecules arose life—and, one day, us.
That the Bible's been saying so all along, clay being what Genesis meant by the "dust of the ground" that formed man, is obvious. What is not so obvious is how often we have been saying it to one another, and without knowing it.
The combined murky-soup and life-from-clay theories, few have realized, have gone even further in substantiating the ancient accounts. Further experiments by Lelia Coyne together
138 GENESIS REVISITED
with Noam Lahab of the Hebrew University, Israel, have shown that to act as catalysts in the formation of short strings of amino acids, the clays must undergo cycles of wetting and drying. This process calls for an environment where water can alternate with dryness, either on dry land that is subjected to on-and-off rains or where seas slosh back and forth as a result of tides. The conclusion, which appeared to gain support from experiments aimed at searching for "protocells" that were conducted at the Institute for Molecular and Cellular Evolution at the University of Miami, pointed to primitive algae as the first one-celled living creatures on Earth. Still found in ponds and in damp places, algae appear little changed in spite of the passage of billions of years.
Because until a few decades ago no evidence for land life older than about 500 million years had been found, it was assumed that the life that evolved from algae was limited to the oceans. "There were algae in the oceans but the land was yet devoid of life," textbooks used to state. But in 1977 a scientific team led by Elso S. Barghoorn of Harvard discovered in sedimentary rocks in South Africa (at a site in Swaziland called Figtree) the remains of microscopic, one-celled creatures that were 3.1 (and perhaps as much as 3.4) billion years old; they were similar to today's blue-green algae and pushed back by almost a billion years the time when this precursor of more complex forms of life evolved on Earth.
Until then evolutionary progression was believed to have occurred primarily in the oceans, with land creatures evolving from maritime forms, with amphibian life forms as an inter- mediary. But the presence of green algae in sedimentary rocks of such a great age required revised theories. Though there is no unanimity regarding the classification of algae as either plant or nonplant, since it has backward affinities with bacteria and forward affinities with the earliest fauna, either green or blue- green algae is undoubtedly the precursor of chlorophyllic plants—the plants that use sunlight to convert their nutrients to organic compounds, emitting oxygen in the process. Green algae, though without roots, stems, or leaves, began the plant family whose descendants now cover the Earth.
It is important to follow the scientific theories of the ensuing evolution of life on Earth in order to grasp the accuracy of the
The Seed of Life 139
biblical record. For more complex life forms to evolve, oxygen was needed. This oxygen became available only after algae or proto-algae began to spread upon the dry land. For these green plantlike forms to utilize and process oxygen, they needed an environment of rocks containing iron with which to "bind" the oxygen (otherwise they would have been destroyed by oxidation; free oxygen was still a poison to these life forms). Scientists believe that as such "banded-iron formations'1 sank into ocean bottoms as sediments, the single-celled organisms evolved into multicelled ones in the water. In other words, the covering of the lands with green algae had to precede the emergence of maritime life.
The Bible, indeed, says as much: Green herbage, it states, was created on Day Three, but maritime life not until Day Five. It was on the third "day," or phase, of creation that Elohim said:
Let the Earth bring forth green herbage, and grasses that yield seeds, and fruit trees that bear fruit of all kinds
in accordance with the seeds thereof.
The presence of fruits and seeds as the green growth ad- vanced from grasses to trees also illustrates the evolution from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction. In this, too, the Bible includes in its scientific account of evolution a step that modern science believes took place, in algae, some two billion years ago. That is when the "green herbage" began to increase the air's oxygen.
At that point, according to Genesis, there were no "crea- tures" on our planet—neither in the waters, nor in the air, nor on dry land. To make the eventual appearance of vertebrate (inner-skeleton) "creatures" possible, Earth had to set the pat- tern of the biological clocks that underlie the life cycles of all living forms on Earth. The Earth had to settle into its orbital and rotational patterns and be subjected to the effects of the Sun and the Moon, which were primarily manifested in the cycles of light and darkness. The Book of Genesis assigns the fourth "day" to this organization and to the resulting year,
140 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 45
month, day, and night repetitious periods. Only then, with all celestial relationships and cycles and their effects firmly es- tablished, did the creatures of the sea, air, and land make their appearance.
Modern science not only agrees with this biblical scenario but, may also provide a clue to the reason the ancient authors of the scientific summary called Genesis inserted a celestial "chapter" ("day four") between the evolutionary record of "day three"—time of the earliest appearance of life forms— and "day five," when the "creatures" appeared. In modern
The Seed of Life 141
science, too, there is an unfilled gap of about 1.5 billion years—from about 2 billion years to about 570 million years ago—about which little is known because of the paucity of geological and fossil data. Modem science calls this era "Pre- cambrian"; lacking the data, the ancient savants used (his gap to describe the establishment of celestial relationships and bi- ological cycles.
Although modern science regards the ensuing Cambrian pe- riod (so named after the region in Wales where the first geologic data for it were obtained) as the first phase of the Paleozoic ("Old Life") era, it was not yet the time of vertebrates—the life forms with an inner skeleton that the Bible calls "crea- tures." The first maritime vertebrates appeared about 500 mil- lion years ago, and land vertebrates followed about 100 million years later, during periods that are regarded by scientists as the transition from the Lower Paleozoic era to the Upper Pa- leozoic era. When that era ended, about 225 million years ago, (Fig. 45) there were fish in the waters as well as sea plants, and amphibians had made the transition from water to dry land and the plants upon the dry lands attracted ihe amphibians to evolve into reptiles; today's crocodiles are a remnant of that evolutionary phase.
The following era, named the Mesozoic ("Middle Life"), embraces the period from about 225 million to 65 million years ago and has often been nicknamed the '' Age of the Dinosaurs.'' Alongside a variety of amphibians and marine lizards there evolved, away from the oceans and their teeming marine life, two main lines of egg-laying reptilians: those who took to flying and evolved into birds; and those who, in great variety, roamed and dominated the Earth as dinosaurs ("terrible lizards") (Fig. 46).
It is impossible to read the biblical verses with an open mind without realizing that the creational events of the fifth "day" of Genesis describe the above-listed development:
And Elohim said:
"Let the waters swarm with living creatures,
and let aves fly above the earth, under the dome of the sky.'' And Elohim created the large reptilians,
and all the living creatures that crawl
142 GENESIS REVISITED
and that swarmed in the waters,
all in accordance with their kinds,
and all the winged aves by their kinds.
And Elohim blessed them, saying:
"Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas, and let the aves multiply upon the earth."
The tantalizing reference in these verses of Genesis to the "large reptilians" as a recognition of the dinosaurs cannot be dismissed. The Hebrew term used here, Taninim (plural of Tanin) has been variously translated as "sea serpent," "sea monsters," and "crocodile." To quote the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica, "the crocodiles are the last living link with the di- nosaur-like reptiles of prehistoric times; they are, at the same
Figure 46
The Seed of Life 143
Figure 47
time, the nearest living relatives of the birds." The conclusion that by "large Taninim"' the Bible meant not simply large reptilians but dinosaurs seems plausible—not because the Su- merians had seen dinosaurs, but because Anunnaki scientists had surely figured out the course of evolution on Earth at least as well as twentieth-century scientists have done.
No less intriguing is the order in which the ancient text lists the three branches of vertebrates. For a long time scientists held that birds evolved from dinosaurs, when these reptiles began to develop a gliding mechanism to ease their jumping from tree branches in search of food or, another theory holds, when ground-bound heavy dinosaurs attained greater running speed by reducing their weight through the development of hollow bones. A fossil confirmation of the origin of birds from the latter, gaining further speed for soaring by evolving two- leggedness, appeared to have been found in the remains of Deinonychus ("terrible-clawed" reptile), a fast runner whose tail skeleton assumed a featherlike shape (Fig. 47). The dis- covery of fossilized remains of a creature now called Ar- chaeopteryx ("old feather"—Fig. 48a) was deemed to have provided the "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds and gave rise to the theory that the two-—dinosaurs and birds—had an early common land ancestor at the beginning of the Triassic period. But even this antedating of the appearance of birds has come into question since additional fossils of Archaeopteryx
144 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 48
The Seed of Life 145
were discovered in Germany; they indicate that this creature was by and large a fully developed bird (Fig. 48b) that had not evolved from the dinosaurs but rather directly from a much earlier ancestor who had come from the seas.
The biblical sources appear to have known all that. Not only does the Bible not list the dinosaurs ahead of birds (as scientists did for awhile); it actually lists birds ahead of the dinosaurs. With so much of the fossil record still incomplete, paleontol- ogists may still find evidence that will indeed show that early birds had more in common with sea life than with desert lizards.
About 65 million years ago the era of the dinosaurs came to an abrupt end; theories regarding the causes range from climatic changes to viral epidemics to destruction by a "Death Star." Whatever the cause, there was an unmistakable end of one evolutionary period and the beginning of another. In the words of Genesis, it was the dawn of the sixth "day." Modern science calls it the Cenozoic ("current life") era, when mam- mals spread across the Earth. This is how the Bible put it:
And Elohim said:
"Let the Earth bring forth living animals
according to their kind:
bovines, and those that creep,
and beasts of the land,
all according to their kind,"
And it was so.
Thus did Elohim make all the animals of the land according to their kinds,
and all the bovines according to their kinds,
and all those that creep upon the earth by their kinds.
There is full agreement here between Bible and Science. The conflict between Creationists and Evolutionists reaches its crux in the interpretation of what happened next—-the appear- ance of Man on Earth. It is a subject that will be dealt with in the next chapter. Here it is important to point out that although one might expect that a primitive or unknowing society, seeing how Man is superior to all other animals, would assume Man to be the oldest creature on Earth and thus the most developed, the wisest. But the Book of Genesis does not say so at all. On
146 GENESIS REVISITED
the contrary, it asserts that Man was a latecomer to Earth. We are not the oldest story of evolution but only its last few pages. Modem science agrees.
That is exactly what the Sumerians had taught in their schools. As we read in the Bible, it was only after all the "days" of creation had run their course, after "all the fishes of the sea and all the fowl that fly the skies and all the animals that fill the earth and all the creeping things that crawl upon the earth" that "Elohim created the Adam."
On the sixth "day" of creation, God's work on Earth was done.
"This," the Book of Genesis states, "is the way the Heaven and the Earth have come to be."
Up to the point of Man's creation, then, modern science and ancient knowledge parallel each other. But by charting the course of evolution, modern science has left behind the initial question about the origin of life as distinct from its development and evolution.
The murky-soup and life-from-clay theories only suggest that, given the right materials and conditions, life could arise spontaneously. This notion, that life's elemental building blocks, such as ammonia and methane (the simplest stable compounds of nitrogen and hydrogen and of carbon and hy- drogen, respectively) could have formed by themselves as part of nature's processes, seemed fortified by the discovery in recent decades that these compounds are present and even plentiful on other planets. But how did chemical compounds become animate?
That the feat is possible is obvious; the evidence is that life did appear on Earth. The speculation that life, in one form or another, may also exist elsewhere in our Solar System, and probably in other star systems, presupposes the feasibility of the transition from inanimate to animate matter. So, the ques- tion is not can it happen but how did it happen here on Earth?
For life as we see it on Earth to happen, two basic molecules are necessary: proteins, which perform all the complex met- abolic functions of living cells; and nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code and issue the instructions for the cell's pro- cesses. The two kinds of molecules, as the definition itself
The Seed of Life 147
suggests, function within a unit called a cell—quite a complex organism in itself, which is capable of triggering the replication not only of itself but of the whole animal of which the single cell is but a minuscule component. In order to become proteins, amino acids must form long and complex chains. In the cell they perform the task according to instructions stored in one nucleic acid (DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid) and transmitted by another nucleic acid (RNA—ribonucleic acid). Could ran- dom conditions prevailing on the primordial Earth have caused amino acids to combine into chains? In spite of varied attempts and theories (notable experiments were conducted by Clifford Matthews of the University of Illinois), the pathways sought by the scientists all required more "compressive energy" than would have been available.
Did DNA and RNA, then, precede amino acids on Earth? Advances in genetics and the unraveling of the mysteries of the living cell have increased, rather than diminished, the prob- lems. The discovery in 1953 by James D. Watson and Francis H. Crick of the "double-helix" structure of DNA opened up vistas of immense complexity regarding these two chemicals of life. The relatively giant molecules of DNA are in the form of two long, twisted strings connected by "rungs" made of four very complex organic compounds (marked on gene- tic charts by the initials of the names of the compounds, A-G-C-T). These four nucleotides can combine in pairs in sequences of limitless variety and are bound into place (Fig. 49) by sugar compounds alternating with phosphates. The nu- cleic acid RNA, no less complex and built of four nucleotides whose initials are A-G-C-U, may contain thousands of com- binations.
How much time did evolution take on Earth to develop these complex compounds, without which life as we know it would have never evolved?
The fossil remains of algae found in 1977 in South Africa were dated to 3.1 to 3.4 billion years ago. But while that discovery was of microscopic, single-celled organisms, other discoveries in 1980 in western Australia deepened the won- derment. The team, led by J. William Schopf of the University of California at Los Angeles, found fossil remains of organisms that not only were much older—3.5 billion years—but that
148 GENESIS REVISITED
Figure 49
were multicelled and looked under the microscope like chain- like filaments (Fig. 50). These organisms already possessed both amino acids and complex nucleic acids, the replicating genetic compounds, 3.5 billion years ago; they therefore had to represent, not the beginning of the chain of life on Earth, but an already advanced stage of it.
What these finds had set in motion can be termed the search for the first gene. Increasingly, scientists believe that before algae there were bacteria. "We are actually looking at cells which are the direct morphological remains of the bugs them- selves," stated Malcolm R. Walter, an Australian member of the team. "They look like modern bacteria," he added. In fact, they looked like five different types of bacteria whose structures, amazingly, "were almost identical to several mod- ern-day bacteria."
The Seed of Life 149
Figure 50
The notion that self-replication on Earth began with bacteria that preceded algae seemed to make sense, since advances in genetics showed that all life on Earth, from the simplest to the most complex, has the same genetic "ingredients" and the same twenty or so basic amino acids. Indeed, much of the early genetic research and development of techniques in genetic engineering were done on the lowly bacterium Esch- erichia coli (E. coli, for short), which can cause diarrhea in humans and cattle. But even this minuscule, single-celled bac- terium that reproduces not sexually but simply by dividing, has almost 4,000 different genes!
That bacteria have played a role in the evolutionary process is apparent, not only from the fact that so many marine, plant and animal higher organisms depend on bacteria for many vital processes, but also from discoveries, first in the Pacific Ocean and then in other seas, that bacteria did and still make possible life forms that do not depend on photosynthesis but metabolize sulfur compounds in the oceans' depths. Calling such early bacteria "archaeo-bacteria," a team led by Carl R. Woese of the University of Illinois dated them to a time between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago. Such an age was corroborated in 1984 by
150 GENESIS REVISITED
finds in an Austrian lake by Hans Fricke of the Max Planck Institute and Karl Stetter of the University of Regensburg (both in West Germany).
Sediments found off Greenland, on the other hand, bear chemical traces that indicate the existence of photosynthesis as early as 3.8 billion years ago. All these finds have thus shown that, within a few hundred million years of the impen- etrable limit of 4 billion years, there were prolific bacteria and archaeo-bacteria of a marked variety on Earth. In more recent studies (Nature, November 9, 1989), an august team of sci- entists led by Norman H. Sleep of Stanford University con- cluded that the "window of time" when life on Earth began was just the 200 million years between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago. "Everything alive today," they stated, "evolved from organisms that originated within that Window of Time." They did not attempt, however, to establish how life originated at such a time.
Based on varied evidence, including the very reliable iso- topic ratios of carbon, scientists have concluded that no matter how life on Earth began, it did so about 4 billion years ago. Why then only and not sooner, when the planets were formed some 4.6 billion years ago? All scientific research, conducted on Earth as well as on the Moon, keeps bumping against the 4-billion-year date, and all that modern science can offer in explanation is some "catastrophic event." To know more, read the Sumerian texts....
Since the fossil and other data have shown that celled and replicating organisms (be they bacteria or archaeo- bacteria) already existed on Earth a mere 200 million years after the "Window of Time" first opened, scientists began to search for the "essence" of life rather than for its resulting organisms: for traces of DNA and RNA themselves. Viruses, which are pieces of nucleic acids looking for cells in which to replicate, are prevalent not only on land but also in water, and that has made some believe that viruses may have preceded bacteria. But what gave them their nucleic acids?
An avenue of research was opened a few years ago by Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, when he proposed that the simpler RNA might have preceded the much more complex DNA. Although RNA only transmits the genetic
The Seed of Life 151
messages contained in the DNA blueprint, other researchers, among them Thomas R. Cech and co-workers at the University of Colorado and Sidney Altman of Yale University concluded that a certain type of RNA could catalyze itself under certain conditions. All this led to computerized studies of a type of RNA called transfer-RNA undertaken by Manfred Eigen, a Nobel-prize winner. In a paper published in Science (May 12, 1989) he and his colleagues from Germany's Max Planck In- stitute reported that by sequencing transfer-RNA backward on the Tree of Life, they found that the genetic code on Earth cannot be older than 3.8 billion years, plus or minus 600 million years. At that time, Manfred Eigen said, a primordial gene might have appeared "whose message was the biblical in- junction 'Go out into the world, be fruitful and multiply'." If the leeway, as it appears, had to be on the plus side—i.e., older than 3.8 billion years—"this would be possible only in the case of extraterrestrial origin," the authors of the learned paper added.
In her summation of the fourth Conference on the Origin of Life, Lynn Margulis had predicted this astounding conclusion. "We now recognize that if the origin of our self-replicating system occurred on the early Earth, it must have occurred quite quickly—millions, not billions of years," she stated. And she added:
The central problem inspiring these conferences, perhaps slightly better defined, is as unsolved as ever. Did our organic matter originate in interstellar space? The infant science of radioastronomy has produced evidence that some of the smaller organic molecules are there.
Writing in 1908, Svante Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making) proposed that life-bearing spores were driven to Earth by the pressure of light waves from the star of another planetary sys- tem where life had evolved long before it did on Earth. The notion came to be known as "the theory of Panspermia"; it languished on the fringes of accepted science because, at the time, one fossil discovery after another seemed to corroborate the theory of evolution as an unchallenged explanation for the origin of life on Earth.
152 GENESIS REVISITED
These fossil discoveries, however, raised their own questions and doubts; so much so that in 1973 the Nobel laureate (now Sir) Francis Crick together with Leslie Orgel, in a paper titled "Directed Panspermia" (Icarus, vol. 19), revived the notion of the seeding of Earth with the first organisms or spores from an extraterrestrial source—not, however, by chance but as "the deliberate activity of an extraterrestrial society." Whereas our Solar System was formed only some 4.6 billion years ago, other solar systems in the universe may have formed as much as 10 billion years earlier; while the interval between the for- mation of Earth and the appearance of life on Earth is much too short, there has been as much as six billion years available for the process on other planetary systems. "The time available makes it possible, therefore, that technological societies existed elsewhere in the galaxy even before the formation of the Earth," according to Crick and Orgel. Their suggestion was therefore that the scientific community "consider a new 'in- fective' theory, namely that a primitive form of life was de- liberately planted on Earth by a technologically advanced society on another planet." Anticipating criticism—which in- deed followed—that no living spores could survive the rigors of space, they suggested that the microorganisms were not sent to just drift in space but were placed in a specially designed spaceship with due protection and a life-sustain ing environ- ment.
In spite of the unquestionable scientific credentials of Crick and Orgel, their theory of Directed Panspermia met with disbe- lief and even ridicule. However, more recent scientific ad- vances changed these attitudes; not only because of the narrowing of the Window of Time to a mere couple of hundred million years, almost ruling out the possibility that the essential genetic matter had enough time to evolve here on Earth. The change in opinion was also due to the discovery that of the myriad of amino acids that exist, it is only the same twenty or so that are part of all living organisms on Earth, no matter what these organisms are and when they evolved; and that the same DNA, made up of the same four nucleotides—that and no other—is present in all living things on Earth.
It was therefore that the participants of the landmark eighth Conference on the Origins of Life, held at Berkeley, California,
The Seed of Life 153
in 1986. could no longer accept the random formation of life inherent in the murky-soup or life-from-clay hypotheses, for according to these theories, a variety of life forms and genetic codes should have arisen. Instead, the consensus was that "all life on Earth, from bacteria to sequoia trees to humans, evolved from a single ancestral cell."
But where did this single ancestral cell come from? The 285 scientists from 22 countries did not endorse the cautious sug- gestions that, as some put it, fully formed cells were planted on Earth from space. Many were, however, willing to consider that "the supply of organic precursors to life was augmented from space." When all was said and done, the assembled scientists were left with only one avenue that, they hoped, might provide the answer to the puzzle of the origin of life on Earth: space exploration. The research should shift from Earth to Mars, to the Moon, to Saturn's satellite Titan, it was sug- gested, because their more pristine environments might have better preserved the traces of the beginnings of life.
Such a course of research reflects the acceptance, it must be obvious, of the premise that life is not unique to Earth. The first reason for such a premise is the extensive evidence that organic compounds permeate the Solar System and outer space. The data from interplanetary probes have been reviewed in an earlier chapter; the data indicating life-related elements and compounds in outer space are so voluminous that only a few instances must suffice here. In 1977, for example, an inter- national team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute dis- covered water molecules outside our own galaxy. The density of the water vapor was the same as in Earth's galaxy, and Otto Hachenberg of the Bonn Institute for Radio Astronomy con- sidered that finding as support for the conclusion that "con- ditions exist at some other place which, like those on Earth, are suitable for life." In 1984 scientists at the Goddard Space Center found ' 'a bewildering array of molecules, including the beginning of organic chemistry" in interstellar space. They had discovered "complex molecules composed of the same atoms that make up living tissue," according to Patrick Thad- deus of the Center's Institute for Space Studies, and it was "reasonable to assume that these compounds were deposited on Earth at the time of its forming and that life ultimately came
154 GENESIS REVISITED
from them." In 1987, to give one more instance, NASA in- struments discovered that exploding stars (supernovas) pro- duced most of the ninety-odd elements, including carbon, that are contained in living organisms on Earth.
How did such life-essential compounds, in forms that ena- bled life to sprout on Earth, arrive on Earth from space, near or distant? Invariably, the celestial emissaries under consid- eration are comets, meteors, meteorites, and impacting aster- oids. Of particular interest to scientists are meteorites containing carbonaceous chondrites, believed to represent the most primordial planetary matter in the Solar System. One, which fell near Murchison in Victoria, Australia, in 1969, revealed an array of organic compounds, including amino acids and nitrogenous bases that embraced all the compounds in- volved in DNA. According to Ron Brown of Monash Uni- versity in Melbourne, researchers have even found "formations in the meteorite reminiscent of a very primitive form of cell structure."
Until then, carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, first collected in France in 1806, were dismissed as unreliable evidence be- cause their life-related compounds were explained away as terrestrial contamination. But in 1977 two meteorites of this type were discovered buried in the icy wilderness of Antarctica, where no contamination was possible. These, and meteorite fragments collected elsewhere in Antarctica by Japanese sci- entists, were found to be rich in amino acids and to contain at least three of the nucleotides (the A, G, and U of the genetic "alphabet") that make up DNA and/or RNA. Writing in Sci- entific American (August 1983), Roy S. Lewis and Edward Anders concluded that "carbonaceous chondrites, the most primitive meteorites, incorporate material originating outside the Solar System, including matter expelled by supernovas and other stars." Radiocarbon dating has given these meteorites an age of 4.5 to 4.7 billion years; it makes them not only as old as but even older than Earth and establishes their extra- terrestrial origin.
Reviving, in a way, the old beliefs that comets cause plagues on Earth, two noted British astronomers. Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, suggested in a study in the New Scientist (November 17, 1977) that "life on Earth began when
The Seed of Life 155
stray comets bearing the building blocks of life crashed into the primitive Earth." In spite of criticism by other scientists, the two have persisted in pressing this theory forward at sci- entific conferences, in books (Lifecloud and others) and in scholarly publications, offering each time more supportive ar- guments for the thesis that "about four billion years ago life arrived in a comet."
Recent close studies of comets, such as Halley's, have shown that the comets, as do the other messengers from far out in space, contain water and other life-building compounds. These findings have led other astronomers and biophysicists to con- cede the possibility that cometary impacts had played a role in giving rise to life on Earth. In the words of Armand Del- semme of the University of Toledo, "A large number of comets hitting Earth contributed a veneer of chemicals needed for the formation of amino acids; the molecules in our bodies were likely in comets at one time."
As scientific advances made more sophisticated studies of meteorites, comets, and other celestial objects possible, the results included an even greater array of the compounds es- sential to life. The new breed of scientists, given the name "Exobiologists," have even found isotopes and other elements in these celestial bodies that indicate an origin preceding the formation of the Solar System. An extrasolar origin for the life that eventually evolved on Earth has thus become a more ac- ceptable proposition. The argument between the Hoyle-Wick- ramasinghe team and others has by now shifted its focus to whether the two are right in suggesting that "spores"—actual microorganisms—rather than the antecedent life-forming com- pounds were delivered to Earth by the cometary/meteoritic impacts.
Could "spores" survive in the radiation and cold of outer space? Skepticism regarding this possibility was greatly dis- pelled by experiments conducted at Leiden University, Hol- land, in 1985. Reporting in Nature (vol. 316) astrophysicist J. Mayo Greenberg and his associate Peter Weber found that this was possible if the "spores" journeyed inside an envelope of molecules of water, methane, ammonia, and carbon monox- ide—all readily available on other celestial bodies. Pansper- mia, they concluded, was possible.
156 GENESIS REVISITED
How about directed panspermia, the deliberate seeding of Earth by another civilization, as suggested earlier by Crick and Orgel? In their view, the "envelope" protecting the spores was not made up just of the required compounds, but was a spaceship in which the microorganisms were kept immersed in nutrients. As much as their proposal smacks of science fiction, the two held fast to their "theorem." "Even though it sounds a bit cranky," Sir Francis Crick wrote in The New York Times (October 26, 1981), "all the steps in the argument are scientifically plausible." Foreseeing that Mankind might one day send its "seeds of life" to other worlds, why could it not be that a higher civilization elsewhere had done it to Earth in the distant past?
Lynn Margulis, a pioneer of the Origin of Life conferences and now a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, held in her writings and interviews that many organisms, when faced with harsh conditions, "release tough little packages"— she named them "Propagules"—"that can carry genetic ma- terial into more hospitable surroundings" (Newsweek, October 2, 1989). It is a natural "strategy for survival" that has ac- counted for "space age spores"; it will happen in the future because it has happened in the past.
In a detailed report concerning all these developments, head- lined "NASA to Probe Heavens for Clues to Life's Origins on Earth" in The New York Times (September 6, 1988), Sandra Blakeslee summed up the latest scientific thinking thus:
Driving the new search for clues to life's beginnings is the recent discovery that comets, meteors and interstellar dust carry vast amounts of complex organic chemicals as well as the elements crucial to living cells.
Scientists believe that Earth and other planets have been seeded from space with these potential building blocks of life.
"Seeded from space"—the very words written down mil- lennia ago by the Sumerians!
It is noteworthy that in his 'presentations, Chandra Wick- ramasinghe has frequently invoked the writings of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras who, about 500 B.C., believed that
The Seed of Life 157
the "seeds of life" swarm through the universe, ready to sprout and create life wherever a proper environment is found. Com- ing as he did from Asia Minor, his sources, as was true for so much of early Greek knowledge, were the Mesopotamian writ- ings and traditions.
After a detour of 6.000 years, modem science has come back to the Sumerian scenario of an invader from outer space that brings the seed of life into the Solar System and imparts it to "Gaia" during the Celestial Battle.
The Anunnaki, capable of space travel about half a million years before us, discovered this phenomenon long before us; in this respect, modem science is just catching up with ancient knowledge.
8
THE ADAM: A SLAVE MADE TO ORDER
The biblical tale of Man's creation is, of course, the crux of the debate—at times bitter—between Creationists and Evo- lutionists and of the ongoing confrontation between them—at times in courts, always on school boards. As previously stated, both sides had better read the Bible again (and in its Hebrew original); the conflict would evaporate once Evolutionists rec- ognized the scientific basis of Genesis and Creationists realized what its text really says.
Apart from the naive assertion by some that in the account of Creation the "days" of the Book of Genesis are literally twenty-four-hour periods and not eras or phases, the sequence in the Bible is, as previous chapters should have made clear, a description of Evolution that is in accord with modern sci- ence. The insurmountable problem arises when Creationists insist that we. Mankind, Homo sapiens sapiens, were created instantaneously and without evolutionary predecessors by "God." "And the Lord God formed Man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and Man became a living soul." This is the tale of Man's creation as told in chapter 2, verse 7 of the Book of Genesis—according to the King James English version; and this is what the Cre- ationist zealots firmly believe.
Were they to learn the Hebrew text—which is, after all, the original—they would discover that, first of all, the creative act is attributed to certain Elohim—a plural term that at the least should be translated as "gods," not "God." And second, they would become aware that the quoted verse also explains why "The Adam" was created: "For there was no Adam to till the land.'' These are two important—and unsettling—hints to who
had created Man and why.
158
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 159
Then, of course, there exists the other problem, that of another (and prior) version of the creation of Man, in Genesis 1:26-27. First, according to the King James version, "God said, Let us make men in our image, after our likeness"; then the suggestion was carried out: "And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them." The biblical account is further com- plicated by the ensuing tale in Chapter 2, according to which "The Adam" was alone until God provided him with a female counterpart, created of Adam's rib.
While Creationists might be hard put to decide which par- ticular version is the sine qua non tenet, there exists the problem of pluralism. The suggestion for Man's creation comes from a plural entity who addresses a plural audience, saying, "Let us make an Adam in our image and after our likeness." What, those who believe in the Bible must ask, is going on here?
As both Orientalists and Bible scholars now know, what went on was the editing and summarizing by the compilers of the Book of Genesis of much earlier and considerably more detailed texts first written down in Sumer. Those texts, re- viewed and extensively quoted in The 12th Planet with all sources listed, relegate the creation of Man to the Anunnaki. It happened, we learn from such long texts as Atra Basis, when the rank-and-file astronauts who had come to Earth for its gold mutinied. The backbreaking work in the gold mines, in south- east Africa, had become unbearable. Enlil, their commander- in-chief, summoned the ruler of Nibiru, his father Anu, to an Assembly of the Great Anunnaki and demanded harsh punish- ment of his rebellious crew. But Anu was more understanding. "What are we accusing them of?" he asked as he heard the complaints of the mutineers. "Their work was heavy, their distress was much!" Was there no other way to obtain the gold, he wondered out loud.
Yes, said his other son Enki (Enlil's half brother and rival), the brilliant chief scientist of the Anunnaki. It is possible to relieve the Anunnaki of the unbearable toil by having someone else take over the difficult work: Let a Primitive Worker be created!
The idea appealed to the assembled Anunnaki. The more they discussed it, the more clear their clamor grew for such a
160 GENESIS REVISITED
Primitive Worker, an Adamu, to take over the work load. But, they wondered, how can you create a being intelligent enough to use tools and to follow orders? How was the creation or "bringing forth," of the Primitive Worker to be achieved? Was it, indeed, a feasible undertaking?
A Sumerian text has immortalized the answer given by Enki to the incredulous assembled Anunnaki, who saw in the cre- ation of an Adamu the solution to their unbearable toil:
The creature whose name you uttered— IT EXISTS!
All you have to do, he added, is to
Bind upon it the image of the gods.
In these words lies the key to the puzzle of Man's creation, the magical wand that removes the conflict between Evolution and Creationism. The Anunnaki, the Elohim of the biblical verses, did not create Man from nothing. The being was already there, on Earth, the product of evolution. All that was needed to upgrade it to the required level of ability and intelligence was to "bind upon it the image of the gods," the image of the Elohim themselves.
For the sake of simplicity let us call the "creature" that already existed then Apeman/Apewoman. The process envi- sioned by Enki was to "bind" upon the existing creature the "image"—the inner, genetic makeup—of the Anunnaki; in other words, to upgrade the existing Apeman/Apewoman through genetic manipulation and, by thus jumping the gun on evolution, bring "Man"—Homo sapiens—into being.
The term Adamu, which is clearly the inspiration for the biblical name "Adam," and the use of the term "image" in the Sumerian text, which is repeated intact in the biblical text, are not the only clues to the Sumerian/Mesopotamian origin of the Genesis creation of Man story. The biblical use of the plural pronoun and the depiction of a group of Elohim reaching a consensus and following it up with the necessary action also lose their enigmatic aspects when the Mesopotamian sources are taken into account.
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 161
In them we read that the assembled Anunnaki resolved lo proceed with the project, and on Enki's suggestion assigned the task to Ninti, their chief medical officer:
They summoned and asked the goddess,
the midwife of the gods, the wise birthgiver, [saying:]
"To a creature give life, create workers! Create a Primitive Worker,
that he may bear the yoke!
Let him bear the yoke assigned by Enlil,
Let The Worker carry the toil of the gods!"
One cannot say for certain whether it was from the Atra Hasis text, from which the above lines are quoted, or from much earlier Sumerian texts that the editors of Genesis got their abbreviated version. But we have here the background of events that led to the need for a Primitive Worker, the assembly of the gods and the suggestion and decision to go ahead and have one created. Only by realizing what the biblical sources were can we understand the biblical tale of the Elohim—the Lofty Ones, the "gods"—saying: "Let us make the Adam in our image, after our likeness," so as to remedy the situation that "there was no Adam to till the land."
In The 12th Planet it was stressed that until the Bible begins to relate the genealogy and history of Adam, a specific person, the Book of Genesis refers to the newly created being as "The Adam," a generic term. Not a person called Adam, but, lit- erally, "the Earthling," for that is what "Adam" means, com- ing as it does from the same root as Adamah, "Earth." But the term is also a play on words, specifically dam, which means "blood" and reflects, as we shall soon see, the manner in which The Adam was "manufactured."
The Sumerian term that means "Man" is LU. But its root meaning is not "human being"; it is rather "worker, servant," and as a component of animal names implied "domesticated." The Akkadian language in which the Atra Hasis text was writ- ten (and from which all Semitic languages have stemmed) applied to the newly created being the term lulu, which means, as in the Sumerian, "Man" but which conveys the notion of
162 GENESIS REVISITED
mixing. The word lulu in a more profound sense thus meant "the mixed one." This also reflected the manner in which The Adam—"Earthling" as well as "He of the blood"—-was cre- ated.
Numerous texts in varying states of preservation or frag- mentation have been found inscribed on Mesopotamian clay tablets. In sequels to The 12th Planet the creation "myths" of other peoples, from both the Old and New Worlds, have been reviewed; they all record a process involving the mixing of a godly element with an earthly one. As often as not, the godly element is described as an "essence" derived from a god's blood, and the earthly element as "clay" or "mud." There can be no doubt that they all attempt to tell the same tale, for they all speak of a First Couple. There is no doubt that their origin is Sumerian, in whose texts we find the most elaborate descriptions and the greatest amount of detail concerning the wonderful deed: the mixing of the "divine" genes of the An- unnaki with the "earthly" genes of Apeman by fertilizing the egg of an Apewoman.
It was fertilization in vitro—in glass tubes, as depicted in this rendering on a cylinder seal (Fig. 51). And, as I have been saying since modern science and medicine achieved the feat of in vitro fertilization, Adam was the first test-tube baby. . . .
Figure 51
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 163
There is reason to believe that when Enki made the surprising suggestion to create a Primitive Worker through genetic ma- nipulation, he had already concluded that the feat was possible. His suggestion to call in Ninti for the task was also not a spur- of-the-moment idea.
Laying the groundwork for ensuing events, the Atra Hasis text begins the story of Man on Earth with the assignment of tasks among the leading Anunnaki. When the rivalry between the two half brothers. Enlil and Enki, reached dangerous levels, Anu made them draw lots. As a result, Enlil was given mastery over the old settlements and operations in the E.DIN (the bib- lical Eden) and Enki was sent to Africa, to supervise the AB. ZU, the land of mines. Great scientist that he was, Enki was bound to have spent some of his time studying the flora and fauna of his surroundings as well as the fossils that, some 300,000 years later, the Leakeys and other paleontologists have been uncovering in southeastern Africa. As scientists do today, Enki, too, must have contemplated the course of evolution on Earth. As reflected in the Sumerian texts, he came to the con- clusion that the same "seed of life" that Nibiru had brought with it from its previous celestial abode had given rise to life on both planets; much earlier on Nibiru, and later on Earth, once the latter had been seeded by the collision.
The being that surely fascinated him most was Apeman— a step above the the other primates, a hominid already walking erect and using sharpened stones as tools, a proto-Man—but not yet a fully evolved human. And Enki must have toyed with the intriguing challenge of "playing God" and conducting experiments in genetic manipulation.
To aid his experiments he asked Ninti to come to Africa and be by his side. The official reason was plausible. She was the chief medical officer; her name meant "Lady Life" (later on she was nicknamed Mammi, the source of the universal Mamma/Mother). There was certainly a need for medical ser- vices, considering the harsh conditions under which the miners toiled. But there was more to it: from the very beginning, Enlil and Enki vied for her sexual favors, for both needed a male heir by a half sister, which she was. The three of them were children of Anu, the ruler of Nibiru, but not of the same mother; and according to the succession rules of the Anunnaki (later
164 GENESIS REVISITED
adopted by the Sumerians and reflected in the biblical tales of the Patriarchs), it was not necessarily the Firstborn son but a son bom by a half sister from the same royal line who became the Legal Heir. Sumerian texts describe torrid lovemaking be- tween Enki and Ninti (with unsuccessful results, though: the offspring were all females); there was thus more than an interest in science that led to Enki's suggestion to call in Ninti and assign the task to her.
Knowing all this, we should not be surprised to read in the creation texts that, first, Ninti said she could not do it alone, that she had to have the advice and help of Enki; and second, that she had to attempt the task in the Abzu, where the right materials and facilities were available. Indeed, the two must have conducted experiments together there long before the suggestion was made at the assembly of the Anunnaki to ''let us make an Adamu in our image." Some ancient depictions show "Bull-Men" accompanied by naked Ape-men (Fig. 52) or Bird-Men (Fig. 53). Sphinxes (bulls or lions with human heads) that adorned many ancient temples may have been more than imaginary representations; and when Berossus, the Ba- bylonian priest, wrote down Sumerian cosmogony and tales of creation for the Greeks, he described a prehuman period when
Figure 52
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 165
Figure 53
"men appeared with two wings," or "one body and two heads," or with mixed male and female organs, or "some with the legs and horns of goats" or other hominid-animal mixtures. That these creatures were not freaks of nature but the result of deliberate experiments by Enki and Ninti is obvious from the Sumerian texts. The texts describe how the two came up with a being who had neither male nor female organs, a man who could not hold back his urine, a woman incapable of bearing children, and creatures with numerous other defects. Finally, with a touch of mischief in her challenging announce- ment, Ninti is recorded to have said:
How good or bad is man's body? As my heart prompts me,
I can make its fate good or bad.
Having reached this stage, where genetic manipulation was sufficiently perfected to enable the determination of the re- sulting body's good or bad aspects, the two felt they could master the final challenge: to mix the genes of hominids. Ape- men, not with those of other Earth creatures but with the genes of the Anunnaki themselves. Using all the knowledge they had amassed, the two Elohim set out to manipulate and speed up the process of Evolution. Modern Man would have undoubt-
166 GENESIS REVISITED
edly eventually evolved on Earth in any case, just as he had done on Nibim, both having come from the same "seed of life." But there was still a long way and a long time to go from the stage hominids were at 300,000 years ago to the level of development the Anunnaki had reached at that time. If, in the course of 4 billion years, the evolutionary process had been earlier on Nibiru just 1 percent of that time, Evolution would have been forty million years ahead on Nibiru compared with the course of evolution on Earth. Did the Anunnaki jump the gun on evolution on our planet by a million or two million years? No one can say for sure how long it would have taken Homo sapiens to evolve naturally on Earth from the earlier hominids, but surely forty million years would have been more than enough time.
Called upon to perform the task of "fashioning servants for the gods"—"to bring to pass a great work of wisdom." in the words of the ancient texts—Enki gave Ninti the following instructions:
Mix to a core the clay
from the Basement of the Earth,
just above the Abzu,
and shape it into the form of a core.
I shall provide good, knowing young Anunnaki who will bring the clay to the right condition.
In The 12th Planet, I analyzed the etymology of the Sumerian and Akkadian terms that are usually translated "clay" or "mud" and showed that they evolved from the Sumerian TI.IT, literally, "that which is with life," and then assumed the derivative meanings of "clay" and "mud," as well as "egg." The earthly element in the procedure for "binding upon" a being who already existed "the image of the gods" was thus to be the female egg of that being—of an Apewoman.
All the texts dealing with this event make it clear that Ninti relied on Enki to provide the earthly element, this egg of a female Apewoman, from the Abzu, from southeast Africa. Indeed, the specific location is given in the above quote: not exactly the same site as the mines (an area identified in The 12th Planet as Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) but a place
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 167
"above" it, farther north. This area was, indeed, as recent finds have shown, where Homo sapiens emerged. . . .
The task of obtaining the "divine" elements was Ninti's. Two extracts were needed from one of the Anunnaki, and a young "god" was carefully selected for the purpose. Enki's instructions to Ninti were to obtain the god's blood and shiru, and through immersions in a "purifying bath" obtain their "essences." What had to be obtained from the blood was termed TE.E.MA, at best translated "personality," a term that expresses the sense of the word: that which makes a person what he is and different from any other person. But the trans- lation "personality" does not convey the scientific precision of the term, which in the original Sumerian meant "That which houses that which binds the memory." Nowadays we call it a "gene."
The other element for which the young Anunnaki was se- lected, shiru, is commonly translated "flesh." In time, the word did acquire the meaning "flesh" among its various con- notations. But in the earlier Sumerian it referred to the sex or reproductive organs; its root had the basic meaning "to bind," "that which binds." The extract from the shiru was referred to in other texts dealing with non-Anunnaki offspring of the "gods" as kisru; coming from the male's member, it meant "semen," the male's sperm.
These two divine extracts were to be mixed well by Ninti in a purifying bath, and it is certain that the epithet lulu ("The mixed one") for the resulting Primitive Worker stemmed from this mixing process. In modern terms we would call him a hybrid.
All these procedures had to be performed under strict sanitary conditions. One text even mentions how Ninti first washed her hands before she touched the "clay." The place where these procedures were carried out was a special structure called in Akkadian Bit Shimti, which, coming from the Sumerian SHI.1M.TI literally meant "house where the wind of life is breathed in"—the source, no doubt, of the biblical assertion that after having fashioned the Adam from the clay, Elohim "blew in his nostrils the breath of life." The biblical term, sometimes translated "soul" rather than "breath of life," is Nephesh. The identical term appears in the Akkadian account
168 GENESIS REVISITED
of what took place in the "house where the wind of life is hreathed in" after the purifying and extracting procedures were completed:
The god who purifies the napishtu, Enki,
spoke up.
Seated before her [Ninti] he was prompting her. After she had recited her incantation,
she put her hand to the clay.
A depiction on a cylinder seal (Fig. 54) may well have illustrated the ancient text. It shows Enki seated, "prompting" Ninti (who is identified by her symbol, the umbilical cord), with the "test-tube" flasks behind her.
The mixing of the "clay" with all the component extracts and "essences" was not yet the end of the procedure. The egg of the Apewoman, fertilized in the "purifying baths" with the sperm and genes of the young Anunnaki "god," was then deposited in a "mold," where the "binding" was to be com- pleted. Since this part of the process is described again later in connection with the determining of the sex of the engineered being, one may surmise that was the purpose of the ' 'binding'' phase.
The length of time the fertilized egg thus processed stayed
Figure 54
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 169
in the "mold" is not stated, but what was to be done with it was quite clear. The fertilized and "molded" egg was to be reimplanted in a female womb—but not in that of its original Apewoman. Rather, it was to be implanted in the womb of a "goddess," an Anunnaki female! Only thus, it becomes clear, was the end result achievable.
Could the experimenters, Enki and Ninti, now be sure that, after all their trial-and-error attempts to create hybrids, they would then obtain a perfect lulu by implanting the fertilized and processed egg in one of their own females—that what she would give birth to would not be a monster and that her own life would not be at risk?
Evidently they could not be absolutely sure; and as often happens with scientists who use themselves as guinea pigs for a dangerous first experiment calling for a human volunteer, Enki announced to the gathered Anunnaki that his own spouse, Ninki ("Lady of the Earth") had volunteered for the task. "Ninki, my goddess-spouse," he announced, "will be the one for labor"; she was to be the one to determine the fate of the new being:
The newborn's fate thou shalt pronounce; Ninki would fix upon it the image of the gods; And what it will be is "Man."
The female Anunnaki chosen to serve as Birth Goddesses if the experiment succeeded, Enki said, should stay and observe what was happening. It was not, the texts reveal, a simple and smooth birth-giving process:
The birth goddesses were kept together. Ninti sat, counting the months.
The fateful tenth month was approaching, The tenth month arrived--
the period of opening the womb had elapsed.
The drama of Man's creation, it appears, was compounded by a late birth; medical intervention was called for. Realizing what had to be done, Ninti "covered her head" and, with an instrument whose description was damaged on the clay tablet,
170 GENESIS REVISITED
"made an opening." This done, "that which was in the womb came forth." Grabbing the newborn baby, she was overcome with joy. Lifting it up for all to see (as depicted in Fig. 51), she shouted triumphantly:
I have created!
My hands have made it!
The first Adam was brought forth.
The successful birth of The Adam—by himself, as the first biblical version states—confirmed the validity of the process and opened the way for the continuation of the endeavor. Now, enough "mixed clay" was prepared to start pregnancies in fourteen birth goddesses at a time:
Ninti nipped off fourteen pieces of clay, Seven she deposited on the right, Seven she deposited on the left; Between them she placed the mold.
Now the procedures were genetically engineered to come up with seven males and seven females at a time. We read on another tablet that Enki and Ninti,
The wise and learned,
Double-seven birth-goddesses had assembled. Seven brought forth males,
Seven brought forth females;
The birth-goddesses brought forth
the Wind of the Breath of Life.
There is thus no conflict among the Bible's various versions of Man's creation. First, The Adam was created by himself; but then, in the next phase, the Elohim indeed created the first humans "male and female."
How many times the "mass production" of Primitive Work- ers was repeated is not stated in the creation texts. We read elsewhere that the Anunnaki kept clamoring for more, and that eventually Anunnaki from the Edin—Mesopotamia—came to the Abzu in Africa and forcefully captured a large number of
The Adam: A Slave Made to Order 171
Primitive Workers to take over the manual work back in Mes- opotamia. We also learn that in time, tiring of the constant need for Birth Goddesses, Enki engaged in a second genetic manipulation to enable the hybrid people to procreate on their own; but the story of that development belongs in the next chapter.
Bearing in mind that these ancient texts come to us across a bridge of time extending back for millennia, one must admire the ancient scribes who recorded, copied, and translated the earliest texts-—as often as not, probably, without really know- ing what this or that expression or technical term originally meant but always adhering tenaciously to the traditions that required a most meticulous and precise rendition of the copied texts.
Fortunately, as we enter the last decade of the twentieth century of the Common Era, we have the benefit of modern science on our side. The "mechanics" of cell replication and human reproduction, the function and code of the genes, the cause of many inherited defects and illnesses—all these and so many more biological processes are now understood; per- haps not yet completely but enough to allow us to evaluate the ancient tale and its data.
With all this modern knowledge at our disposal, what is the verdict on that ancient information? Is it an impossible fantasy, or are the procedures and processes, described with such at- tention to terminology, corroborated by modern science?
The answer is yes, it is all the way we would do it today— the way we have been following, indeed, in recent years.
We know today that to have someone or something ' 'brought forth" in the "image" and "after the likeness" of an existing being (be it a tree, a mouse, a man) the new being must have the genes of its creator; otherwise, a totally different being would emerge. Until a few decades ago all that science was aware of was that there are sets of chromosomes lurking within every living cell that impart both the physical and mental/ emotional characteristics to offspring. But now we know that the chromosomes are just stems on which long strands of DNA are positioned. With only four nucleotides at its disposal, the DNA can be sequenced in endless combinations, in short or
172 GENESIS REVISITED
long stretches interspersed with chemical signals that can mean "stop" or "go" instructions (or, it seems, to do nothing at all anymore). Enzymes are produced and act as chemical busy- bodies, launching chemical processes, sending off RNAs to do their job, creating proteins to build body and muscles, produce the myriad differentiated cells of a living creature, trigger the immune system, and, of course, help the being procreate by bringing forth offspring in its own image and after its likeness.
The beginnings of genetics are now credited to Gregor Jo- hann Mendel, an Austrian monk who, experimenting with plant hybridization, described the hereditary traits of common peas in a study published in 1866. A kind of genetic engineering has of course been practiced in horticulture (the cultivation of flowers, vegetables, and fruits) through the procedure called grafting, where the part of the plant whose qualities are desired to be added to those of another plant is added via an incision to the recipient plant. Grafting has also been tried in recent years in the animal kingdom, but with limited success between donor and recipient due to rejection by the recipient's immune system.
The next advance, which for a while received great publicity, was the procedure called Cloning. Because each cell—let us say a human cell—contains all the genetic data necessary to reproduce that human, it has the potential forgiving rise, within a female egg, to the birth of a being identical to its parent. In theory, cloning offers a