The Missing Lands

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The Missing Lands Page 22

by Freddy Silva


  The Sumerians believed there once existed a land called Dilmun which they identified as the Garden of the Gods. It has been argued that Dilmun was nothing more than a myth, partly because it was said to be inhabited by immortals, and yet, as we have seen, antediluvian people were attributed with superhuman life spans that, to any person and their great, great, great, great grandchildren, would make them seem impervious to death. Since it is a view shared by so many disparate cultures, at the very least we ought to treat the notion as a valid observation, even if it sounds outlandish, because there is plenty of circumstantial evidence in support of Dilmun as a physical location.

  During his tenure as trustee of the British Museum in the late 19th century, Sir Henry Rawlinson was perhaps the first to suggest the location of Dilmun to be in modern-day Bahrain, based partly on the region's Old Mesopotamian name, Karsag Dilmun,8 and the plethora of archaeological sites found there which were conservatively dated to the Bronze Age. Aside from the sites being far too young to be linked to an antediluvian culture, the theory has a few problems in itself, namely that Sumerian texts describe this home of the Anunaki as filled with groves of cedars and towered by twin mountains, neither of which exist in the vicinity of Bahrain. In Rawlinston's defence, the Earth was a very different place 11,000 years ago, mountains fell and rose in the blink of an eye, landmasses sank, seas became deserts, deserts became seas. Only now are geologists beginning to grapple with the idea of how a cosmic calamity rearranged the planet beyond recognition.

  It must also be emphasized that the Sumerian tradition Rawlinson used for reference was borrowed from older Mesopotamian texts describing events that had taken place five thousand years earlier. Given such a span of time, transliterating from a dead language into another would have posed enormous problems, artefacts are certain to have crept into the texts, in fact the Sumerians most likely faced the same obstacles later Greek historians did when translating Sumerian and Akkadian into their own language; even in Egypt, most people by 1500 BC had no clue what the hieroglyphs were trying to tell them.

  That said, in the fourth millennium BC, around the time of Sumer, a people called Dilmun or Telmun did live around the Persian Gulf, specifically in Qatar, Kuwait, portions of eastern Arabia, and Bahrain.9 One inscription to king Ur-Nanshe of Lagash mentions "the ships from Dilmun brought him wood as tribute from foreign lands," so clearly neither the ship, its cargo or port of origin were imaginary.10 Could the Dilmun of the Sumerians have been a remnant of an earlier, much disfigured land, the home of the Anunaki? For one thing, evidence of an intermediate civilization lying between Mesopotamia and India has already been found in the general area of Bahrain.11

  Rawlinson's theory was later expanded and refined by Frederich Delitzsch, who believed Dilmun to be further east and near the head of the Persian Gulf, by the Straits of Hormuz. I believe he might have been on to something.

  Like North Africa, Arabia was severely reshaped by events at the close of the Younger Dryas. The fertile plain that existed prior to the creation of the Persian Gulf once supported a sizeable population 75,000 years ago. That all changed c.9000 BC when the sea at the Gulf of Oman broke through the Straits of Hormuz and drowned much of the region; by 6000 BC the entire area was underwater. Archaeologists have turned up evidence of a sudden wave of human settlement along the shores of the gulf c.5500 BC and, more importantly, they believe that precursor civilizations existed yet still lie hidden beneath the waters. 12

  There is additional support for this in Mesopotamian legend. It claims how an Anunaki god by the name of Enki founded the antediluvian city of Eridu in southern Mesopotamia, yet Enki himself was said to originate from Dilmun, a land filled with springs, and free of disease and death. It was referred to as "the land from which the Sun rises." Assuming this isn't just a metaphor, it places Dilmun east of Bahrain, either near the Straits of Hormuz —as Delitzsch speculated — or further out in the Indian Ocean but now missing.

  Egyptian papyrus number 1115 may have something to say about this. Stored in the Hermitage Museum, this remarkable document details the story of an Egyptian sailor journeying with others down the Red Sea. The ship was caught in a storm in the Indian Ocean, and all but one — the narrator — survived, only to be shipwrecked on an island. At first he believed it to be uninhabited, but in time he came to meet its ruler, who gave the sailor a new boat and some gifts and sent him home to Egypt. At the farewell, the ruler remarked to the sailor, "after you depart from this place you will never see it again, for it will turn into waves."

  Although the papyrus itself is more than five thousand years old, the era in which the event took place is unknown. What is interesting is how the ruler of the island had foreknowledge of its disappearance, so either the story took place just before the flood, or the flood had already taken place and the island would soon be consumed by rising seas. We can only speculate. However, the description of the ruler offers an insight into the kind of people living there, for the sailor describes him as a serpent with blue eyes and a beard. It seems our shipwrecked sailor inadvertently stumbled upon the island of the People of the Serpent — the Annunage, as they were known in India. The unique papyrus comes as close as any document linking the Anunaki to a home somewhere in the vicinity of Arabia or the Indian Ocean. It is worth recalling that the Anunaki were referred to as Shining Ones — as in Shining Ones, Followers of Horus, and the Egyptians believed these gods originally sailed from Ta Neterw, the homeland of the gods, which lay to the south, the direction of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

  Mesopotamian accounts contribute a few morsels to this puzzle. They describe the assembly of the Anunaki as being located at the summit of a very tall mountain, and in relation to northern and eastern Arabia the only area that fits such a description is the peninsula of Musandam, an exclave of the Sultanate of Oman, which juts dramatically into the Persian Gulf to form the lower portion of the Straits of Hormuz. It's a ragged piece of land, ironically still sliding into the sea, with an interior packed with mountains over 6000 feet in altitude, the highest in the region by a very long margin. The name of its main city, Khasab, may be a modern corruption of Karsag, the assembly of the Anunaki, but like so many ancient riddles in Arabia it is not known how the small city acquired this name, or for that matter, its history before the Portuguese built a fort there in the eighteenth century.

  Teotokai Andrew was right, locating Te Pitaka will prove difficult due to the drastic rearrangement of terrain following the flood.

  THE SAGES OF MESOPOTAMIA

  "I learned the craft of Adapa the sage, which is the secret knowledge... I am well acquainted with the signs of heaven and earth... I am enjoying the writings on stones from before the flood."13 So spoke Ashurbanipal, 7th century BC Sumerian king. What else might the monarch have gleaned from writings that, by his time, were nine thousand years old?

  Sumeria's flood myth is widely accepted among scholars as being the source for the story depicted in the Old Testament, minus the obvious cultural and religious alterations. The Sumerians in turn inherited theirs from the Mesopotamians, the most complete account being the Schoyen Tablet. It begins with the emergence of humans and animals on Earth. After a frustrating thirty-seven lines of missing text the story resumes in a different era, a time of high civilization when “kingship was lowered from heaven”14 during an antediluvian period in which an unnamed god “perfected the rites and the exalted divine laws... founded the five cities... in pure places, called their names, apportioned them as cult centers.” The cities are Eridu, Badtibira, Larak, Sippar and Shuruppak.15 Although they are conventionally dated to c.5400 BC, excavations reveal the foundations of the main temples to have been built much earlier; for instance, the Eridu ziggurat rests on seventeen previous temples, attesting to these sites having indeed been founded in deep antiquity, exactly as claimed in the tablets.16

  Mesopotamian flood epic. Still a best-seller in 700 BC.

  After another series of missing lines the story has jumped
far into the future, when a pious priest-king by the name Zin-suddu (Life of Long Days) is being advised by the god Enki to prepare for “a flood that will sweep over the cult centers, to destroy the seed of mankind,” due to it having reached a level of corruption beyond what was acceptable to the gods.17 Enki instructs Zin-suddu to bury all the tablets in a safe place in the city of Sippar, so that survivors "may relearn all that the gods had taught them."18 What follows is predictable: after being instructed to build a vara (a large enclosed boat), and taking on board seven Apkallu, Zin-suddu describes the flood overwhelming the cities to the accompaniment of exceedingly powerful windstorms, and for seven days and nights his mighty ship is tossed about the waters.

  After yet another frustrating break in the text — the tablets were found damaged — the story picks up with a dazed Zin-suddu standing in the presence of the high gods Enlil and Anu who expresses dismay — and remorse — at the appalling destruction that has befallen humanity and the Earth. Zin-suddu is then instructed to return to Sippar, dig up the tablets “and turn them over to mankind."19 He does and "they built cities and erected temples to the gods."20

  A second and parallel flood narrative, Epic of Gilgamesh, provides a little more detail. The hero Utnapishtim — a descendent of the Apkallu who bore the title Atrakhasis (Unsurpassed in Wisdom) — is forewarned by Enki, who lives in a cube-shaped structure beneath the sea. After the conflagration, Utnapishtim's ship runs aground on Mount Nisir (Mount of Salvation),21 where he is approached by seven Apkallu and told that they expect the knowledge stored in the tablets previously buried in Sippar to survive a future cataclysm. For all his efforts Utnapishtim, like Zin-suddu, is rewarded with immortality.

  A substantial part of what we know about ancient Mesopotamia comes from History of Babylonia compiled by the Chaldean astronomer-priest Belreusu, who wrote his accounts from whatever public records and temple archives were still available in the third century BC, information which, he stated, had been maintained and preserved for “over 150,000 years.”22 Obviously the Sumerians were very comfortable with the antiquity they inherited. The accounts describe how the sage Ua-annu — a man of letters and sciences, an architect, temple builder, lawgiver, geometrician, and agriculturalist — brought the civilizing arts to humans who, in that period, behaved no better than wild beasts. Ua-annu’s full name and title is Uannadapa, adapa meaning ‘sage, wise',23 the root of adept. Over the course of several thousands of years this sage, who was "endowed with comprehensive understanding," together with his band of Apkallu — which included An-Enlil-da, "conjurer of the city of Eridu" — created the antediluvian cities and formed a great civilization. These people are described as conjurers, magicians, sorcerers, engineers, craftsmen, stonecutters, and masters of “the chemical recipes” and practical magic. The foundations they implemented during antediluvian times, plus all future renovations of the sites, were attributed to their knowledge,24 the purpose of which was to establish the plans of heaven on earth.25

  Enki with another Anunaki sage.

  Notice how the Apkallu built civilization before the flood. This Golden Age and its cities were already long established before the events that unfolded at the end of the Younger Dryas, implying these magicians were indeed capable of living for hundreds of years. This explains why scholars are at pains to account for the sudden and fully formed Sumerian civilization — or the Egyptian, or Yucatec, or Andean, for that matter — unless they accept it as the renovation of a previous endeavor. For example, Sumerian language, like Aymara, is peculiar in that it is not related to any other world language and yet when it appears it does so fully developed.26 Given such comparative idiosyncrasies, whoever injected this instant culture heralded from one which developed parallel to ordinary humans.

  Early chroniclers like Belreusu go to great pains to point out that the rise of Sumerian civilization owed everything to the knowledge of the Apkallu. What they brought to the region was about as perfect as it gets, and the cuneiform texts describe in no uncertain terms how, through their intervention, humanity experienced “exceptional splendor and plenty, the golden age before the flood.”27 The Sumerians were still crowing about Ua-annu thousands of years after the flood: "There is nothing he brought that has been added by way of improvement." Together with seven Apkallu he rebuilt the decimated region and prescribed a moral code.28 As his name implies, Ua-annu is one of the People of Anu.

  Incidentally, one variant of his name is Ou-anaa, which bears such a close resemblance to Ouaraa, the ruler of Easter Island c.800 AD, that it makes one wonder just how long the lineage of the Anunaki was maintained throughout the Pacific, especially in light of Teotokai Andrew's revelation of the Anunaki being present in the Cook Islands around 3000 BC.

  ENOCH MEETS ENMED-URANNA MEETS ENOCH

  Four miles south of Harran — twenty-six from Göbekli Tepe — lies a permanent settlement on a mound called Tell Idris dating to c.8000 BC. In the Koran, Idris is the name given to Enoch, the Hebrew antediluvian prophet and great-grandfather of Noah, who is also identified in Islam with the Egyptian Twt, inventor of writing, astronomy and sacred buildings.29 According to 9th century Persian philosopher Abu Mashar, Idris — and Enoch and Twt, for that matter — may not have been a name but a title, "its first bearer, who lived before the Flood... The Harranians declare his prophethood... He wrote many books whose wisdom he preserved on the walls of Egyptian temples lest it be lost. It was he who constructed the pyramids."30

  It seems even the Persians believed the pyramids to have been built before the flood by one of the Shining Ones.

  Enoch's published work, Book of Enoch, was discovered in Ethiopia. Written in Ge'ez, the Ethiopian sacred language, it is the most enthralling and unique of gospels and yet was excluded from the biblical canon, marginalized as an apocryphal work; it also predates the official gospels by at least two centuries. But before we get deep into the Hebrew version of things, a lesson in geopolitics.

  The Babylonians made quite clear their displeasure of the Hebrews, how, during their captivity, they purloined Babylonian accounts concerning the creation, the antediluvian Earth, the flood myth, its hero, and tales of unusual beings called Apkallu or Watchers. Whether we agree with this or not, the point remains that the Babylonians themselves received their accounts from the Chaldeans and Sumerians, who in turn inherited theirs from remote sources, and by the time the Hebrews got their hands on the material, the Babylonians themselves had added a few prejudices of their own. A case of the pot calling the kettle black. Regardless, there is one point of interest. In the Babylonian/Sumerian narrative, the seventh antediluvian hero is a man of letters who is invited to a high location where he receives insights into divine wisdom from two heavenly beings or gods named Adad and Shamash. This hero Enmed-uranna was also king of Sippar, founder of the guild of bãrûs or diviners, and a recipient of revelations — in other words, a wise man or magician, as his surname clearly indicates.31 (In Sumerian the name means ‘meeting place of heaven’).32

  The description of Enmed-uranna and his experience — ascent to a mountain, direct contact with the gods in their abode, the dictation of specialist knowledge, the offering of drugs of immortality by the god Anu, the dressing in divine linens, the anointing with oil — is remarkably identical to that of Enoch's, who is similarly listed in Genesis as the seventh in line from Adam. The 6th century itinerant Nestonian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote an account during his travels in the region that juxtaposes, with great precision, the Chaldean and Hebrew accounts right down to their respective flood heroes Zin-suddu and Noah. Indeed the Mesopotamian traditions provided the model that biblical writers deliberately modified, inverted and reinterpreted, with the intent to show off the superiority of Jewish cultural foundations.33 Furthermore, as the scholar Amar Annus points out, “Jewish authors systematically discredited the Mesopotamian primordial sages [apkallu] as the Watchers and Nephilim, while making them part of national history. In Jewish reinterpretation, Mesopotamian antediluvian sages
became illegitimate and wicked teachers of humankind.”34

  There is another name entering the conversation here, the nephilim, and we shall come to them soon.

  The Anunaki appear in the Book of Enoch as a-nan-na and its variant a-nun-na. They are sages who live in a settlement called Gar-sag, which Hebrew writers erroneously equated with a heavenly paradise by mistranslating the Akkadian description of the settlement as shamu, a 'lofty, walled enclosure', later transliterated in Persian as paeri-disa. This large compound on the summit of Mount Ardis featured the Building of Knowledge, and a restricted building where the Wise Ones — the high assembly of the Lords of Anu — held council. One of them, Enlil, was both Lord of the Air and Lord of Cultivation,35 while his wife Ninlil bore the title Nikharsag and was referred to as Serpent Lady.

  After the Lords of Anu settle on Ardis, several hundred teacher-craftsmen named Watchers descend and assist in the enterprise. This took place in the days of Jared, father of Enoch, hundreds of years before the flood.36

  WATCHERS OR ANGELS?

  Enoch is described as "a truthful man... writer of the truth," a faithful scribe who is trusted enough to be regularly taken to the compound of the Anu, aboard of what can only be described as a flying device that airlifts him to the summit: "The men called me. They lifted me up and placed me on what seemed to be a cloud, and this cloud moved, and going upwards I could see the sky around and, still higher, I seemed to be in space. Eventually we landed on the First Haven and there they showed me a very great sea, much bigger than the inland sea where I lived."37 The Greek account from which this is taken describes the vehicle as pneuma (air), so we can deduce Enoch boarded an air-chariot — probably the same husen-gal (great bird) in which Enlil flew, as described in Sumerian tablets.

 

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