The 12th Planet

by Zacharia Sitchin

  The 12th Planet

  Zacharia Sitchin

  GENESIS

  THE PRIME SOURCE for the biblical verses quoted in The Twelfth Planet is the Old Testament in its original Hebrew text. It must be borne in mind that all the translations consulted of which the principal ones are listed at the end of the book - are just that: translations or interpretations. In the final analysis, what counts is what the original Hebrew says.

  In the final version quoted in The Twelfth Planet, I have compared the available translations against each other and against the Hebrew source and the parallel Sumerian and Akkadian texts/tales, to come up with what I believe is the most accurate rendering.

  The rendering of Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite texts has engaged a legion of scholars for more than a century. Decipherment of script and language was followed by transcribing, transliterating, and finally, translating. In many instances, it was possible to choose between differing translations or interpretations only by verifying the much earlier transcriptions and transliterations. In other instances, a late insight by a contemporary scholar could throw new light on an early translation. The list of sources for Near Eastern texts, given at the end of this book, thus ranges from the oldest to the newest, and is followed by the scholarly publications in which valuable contributions to the understanding of the texts were found. THE OLD TESTAMENT has filled my life from childhood. When the seed for this book was planted, nearly fifty years ago, I was totally unaware of the then raging Evolution versus Bible debates. But as a young schoolboy studying Genesis in its original Hebrew, I created a confrontation of my own. We were reading one day in Chapter VI that when God resolved to destroy Mankind by the Great Flood, "the sons of the deities", who married the daughters of men, were upon the Earth. The Hebrew original named them Nefilim; the teacher explained it meant "giants"; but I objected: didn't it mean literally "Those Who Were Cast Down", who had descended to Earth? I was reprimanded and told to accept the traditional interpretation. In the ensuing years, as I have learned the languages and history and archaeology of the ancient Near East, the Nefilim became an obsession. Archaeological finds and the deciphering of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Canaanite and other ancient texts and epic tales increasingly confirmed the accuracy of the biblical references to the kingdoms, cities, rulers, places, temples, trade routes, artifacts, tools and customs of antiquity. Is it not now time, therefore, to accept the word of these same ancient records regarding the Nefilim as visitors to Earth from the heavens?

  The Old Testament repeatedly asserted: "The throne of Yahweh is in heaven" - "from heaven did the Lord behold the Earth". The New Testament spoke of "Our Father, which art in Heaven". But the credibility of the Bible was shaken by the advent and general acceptance of Evolution. If Man evolved, then surely he could not have been created all at once by a Deity who, premeditating, had suggested "Let us make Adam in our image and after our likeness". All the ancient peoples believed in gods who had descended to Earth from the heavens and who could at will soar heavenwards. But these tales were never given credibility, having been branded by scholars from the very beginning as myths.

  The writings of the ancient Near East, which include a profusion of astronomical texts, clearly speak of a planet from which these astronauts or "gods" had come. However, when scholars, fifty and one hundred years ago, deciphered and translated the ancient lists of celestial bodies, our astronomers were not yet aware of Pluto (which was only located in 1930). How then could they be expected to accept the evidence of yet one more member of our solar system? But now that we too, like the ancients, are aware of the planets beyond Saturn, why not accept that ancient evidence for the existence of the Twelfth Planet? As we ourselves venture into space, a fresh look and an acceptance of the ancient scriptures is more than timely. Now that astronauts have landed on the Moon, and unmanned spacecraft explore other planets, it is no longer impossible to believe that a civilization on another planet more advanced than ours was capable of landing its astronauts on the planet Earth some time in the past.

  Indeed, a number of popular writers have speculated that ancient artifacts such as the pyramids and giant stone sculptures must have been fashioned by advanced visitors from another planet - for surely primitive man could not have possessed by himself the required technology? How was it, for another example, that the civilization of Sumer seemed to flower so suddenly nearly 6,000 years ago without a precursor? But since these writers usually fail to show when, how and, above all, from where such ancient astronauts did come - their intriguing questions remain unanswered speculations.

  It has taken thirty years of research, of going back to the ancient sources, of accepting them literally, to re-create in my own mind a continuous and plausible scenario of prehistoric events. The Twelfth Planet, therefore, seeks to provide the reader with a narrative giving answers to the specific questions of When, How, Why and Wherefrom. The evidence I adduce consists primarily of the ancient texts and pictures themselves.

  In The Twelfth Planet I have sought to decipher a sophisticated cosmogony which explains, perhaps as well as modern scientific theories, how the solar system could have been formed, an invading planet caught into solar orbit, and Earth and other parts of the solar system brought into being.

  The evidence I offer includes celestial maps dealing with space flight to Earth from that Planet, the Twelfth. Then, in sequence, follow the dramatic establishment of the first settlements on Earth by the Nefilim: their leaders were named; their relationships, loves, jealousies, achievements and struggles described; the nature of their "immortality" explained.

  Above all, The Twelfth Planet aims to trace the momentous events that led to the creation of Man, and the advanced methods by which this was accomplished.

  It then suggests the tangled relationship between Man and his lords, and throws fresh light on the meaning of the events in the Garden of Eden, of the Tower of Babel, of the great Flood. Finally, Man - endowed by his makers biologically and materially- - ends up crowding his gods off the Earth.

  This book suggests that we are not alone in our solar system. Yet it may enhance rather than diminish the faith in a universal Almighty. For, if the Nefilim created Man on Earth, they may have only been fulfilling a vaster Master Plan. Z. SITCHIN New York, February 1977 THE ENDLESS BEGINNING

  OF THE EVIDENCE that we have amassed to support our conclusions, exhibit number one is Man himself. In many ways,

  modern man - Homo sapiens - is a stranger to Earth.

  Ever since Charles Darwin shocked the scholars and theologians of his time with the evidence of evolution, life on Earth has been traced through Man and the primates, mammals, and vertebrates, and backward through ever-lower life forms to the point, billions of years ago, at which life is presumed to have begun.

  But having reached these beginnings and having begun to contemplate the probabilities of life elsewhere in our solar system and beyond, the scholars have become uneasy about life on Earth: Somehow, it does not belong here. If it began through a series of spontaneous chemical reactions, why does life on Earth have but a single source, and not a multitude of chance sources? And why does all living matter on Earth contain too little of the chemical elements that abound on Earth, and too much of those that are rare on our planet? Was life, then, imported to Earth from elsewhere?

  Man's position in the evolutionary chain has compounded the puzzle. Finding a broken skull here, a jaw there, scholars at first believed that Man originated in Asia some 500,000 years ago. But as older fossils were found, it became evident that the mills of evolution grind much, much slower. Man's ancestor apes are now placed at a staggering 25,000,000 years ago. Discoveries in East Africa reveal a transition to manlike apes (hominids) some 14,000,0
00 years ago. It was about 11,000,000 years later that the first ape-man worthy of the classification Homo appeared there.

  The first being considered to be truly manlike - "Advanced Australopithecus" - existed in the same parts of Africa some 2,000,000 years ago. It took yet another million years to produce Homo erectus. Finally, after another 900,000 years, the first primitive Man appeared; he is named Neanderthal after the site where his remains were first found.

  In spite of the passage of more than 2,000,000 years between Advanced Australopithecus and Neanderthal, the tools of these two groups - sharp stones - were virtually alike; and the groups themselves (as they are believed to have looked) were hardly distinguishable.

  Then, suddenly and inexplicably, some 35,000 years ago, a new race of Men - Homo sapiens ("thinking Man") - appeared as if from nowhere, and swept Neanderthal Man from the face of Earth. These modern Men - named Cro-Magnon - looked so much like us that, if dressed like us in modern clothes, they would be lost in the crowds of any European or American city. Because of the magnificent cave art which they created, they were at first called "cavemen." In fact, they roamed Earth freely, for they knew how to build shelters and homes of stones and animal skins wherever they went.

  For millions of years, Man's tools had been simply stones of useful shapes. Cro-Magnon Man, however, made specialized tools and weapons of wood and bones. He was no longer a "naked ape," for he used skins for clothing. His society was organized; he lived in clans with a patriarchal hegemony. His cave drawings bespeak artistry and depth of feeling; his drawings and sculptures evidence some form of "religion," apparent in the worship of a Mother Goddess, who was sometimes depicted with the sign of the Moon's crescent. He buried his dead, and must therefore have had some philosophies regarding life, death, and perhaps even an afterlife.

  As mysterious and unexplained as the appearance of Cro-Magnon Man has been, the puzzle is still more complicated. For, as other remains of modern Man were discovered (at sites including Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Montmaria), it became apparent that Cro-Magnon Man stemmed from an even earlier Homo sapiens who lived in western Asia and North Africa some 2500000 years before Cro-Magnon Man.

  The appearance of modem Man a mere 700,000 years after Homo erectus and some 200,000, years before Neanderthal Man is absolutely implausible. It is also clear that Homo sapiens represents such an extreme departure from the slow evolutionary process that many of our features, such as the ability to speak, are totally unrelated to the earlier primates. An outstanding authority on the subject, Professor Theodosius Dobzhansky (Mankind Evolving), was especially puzzled by the fact that this development took place during a period when Earth was going through an ice age, a most unpropitious time for evolutionary advance. Pointing out that Homo sapiens lacks completely some of the peculiarities of the previously known types, and has some that never appeared before, he concluded: "Modern man has many fossil collateral relatives but no progenitors; the derivation of Homo sapiens, then, becomes a puzzle."

  How, then, did the ancestors of modern Man appear some 300,000 years ago - instead of 2,000,000 or 3,000,000

  years in the future, following further evolutionary development? Were we imported to Earth from elsewhere, or were we, as the

  Old Testament and other ancient sources claim, created by the gods?

  We now know where civilization began and how it developed, once it began. The unanswered question is: Why - why did civilization come about at all? For, as most scholars now admit in frustration, by all data Man should still be without civilization. There is no obvious reason that we should be any more civilized than the primitive tribes of the Amazon jungles or the inaccessible parts of New Guinea,

  But, we are told, these tribesmen still live as if in the Stone Age because they have been isolated. But isolated from what? If they have been living on the same Earth as we, why have they not acquired the same knowledge of sciences and technologies on their own as we supposedly have?

  The real puzzle, however, is not the backwardness of the Bushmen, but our advancement; for it is now recognized that in the normal course of evolution Man should still be typified by the Bushmen and not by us. It took Man some 2,000,000 years to advance in his "tool industries" from the use of stones as he found them to the realization that he could chip and shape stones to better suit his purposes. Why not another 2,000,000 years to learn the use of other materials, and another 10,000,000 years to master mathematics and engineering and astronomy? Yet here we are, less than 50,000 years from Neanderthal Man, landing astronauts on the Moon.

  The obvious question, then, is this: Did we and our Mediterranean ancestors really acquire this advanced civilization on our own?

  Though Cro-Magnon Man did not build skyscrapers nor use metals, there is no doubt that his was a sudden and revolutionary civilization. His mobility, ability to build shelters, his desire to clothe himself, his manufactured tools, his art - all were a sudden high civilization breaking an endless beginning of Man's culture that stretched over millions of years and advanced at a painfully

  slow pace.

  Though our scholars cannot explain the appearance of Homo sapiens and the civilization of Cro-Magnon Man, there is by now no doubt regarding this civilization's place of origin: the Near East. The uplands and mountain ranges that extend in a semiarc from the Zagros Mountains in the east (where present-day Iran and Iraq border on each other), through the Ararat and Taurus ranges in the north, then down, westward and southward, to the hill lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, are replete with caves where the evidence of prehistoric but modern Man has been preserved.

  One of these caves, Shanidar, is located in the northeastern part of the semiarc of civilization. Nowadays, fierce Kurdish tribesmen seek shelter in the area's caves for themselves and their flocks during the cold winter months. So it was, one wintry night 44,000 years ago, when a family of seven (one of whom was a baby) sought shelter in the cave of Shanidar. Their remains - they were evidently crushed to death by a rockfall - were discovered in 1957 by a startled Ralph Solecki, who went to the area in search of evidence of early Man (Professor Solecki has told me that nine skeletons were found, of which only four were crushed by rockfall.) What he found was more than he expected. As layer upon layer of debris was removed, it became apparent that the cave preserved a clear record of Man's habitation in the area from about 100,000 to some 13,000 years ago.

  What this record showed was as surprising as the find itself. Man's culture has shown not a progression but a regression. Starting from a certain standard, the following generations showed not more advanced but less advanced standards of civilized life. And from about 27,000 B.C. to 11,000 B.C., the regressing and dwindling population reached the point of an almost complete absence of habitation. For reasons that are assumed to have been climatic, Man was almost completely gone from the whole area for some 16,000 years.

  And then, circa 11,000 B.C., "thinking Man" reappeared with new vigor and on an inexplicably higher cultural level.

  It was as if an unseen coach, watching the faltering human game, dispatched to the field a fresh and better-trained team to take

  over from the exhausted one.

  Throughout the many millions of years of his endless beginning, Man was nature's child; he subsisted by gathering the foods that grew wild, by hunting the wild animals, by catching wild birds and fishes. But just as Man's settlements were thinning out, just as he was abandoning his abodes, when his material and artistic achievements were disappearing - just then, suddenly, with no apparent reason and without any prior known period of gradual preparation - Man became a farmer. Summarizing the work of many eminent authorities on the subject, R. J. Braidwood and B. Howe (Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan) concluded that genetic studies confirm the archaeological finds and leave no doubt that agriculture began exactly where Thinking Man had emerged earlier with his first crude civilization: in the Near East. There is no doubt by now that agriculture spread all over the world from the Near East
ern arc of mountains and highlands.

  Employing sophisticated methods of radiocarbon dating and plant genetics, many scholars from various fields of science concur in the conclusion that Man's first farming venture was the cultivation of wheat and barley, probably through the domestication of a wild variety of emmer. Assuming that, somehow, Man did undergo a gradual process of teaching himself how to domesticate, grow, and farm a wild plant, the scholars remain baffled by the profusion of other plants and cereals basic to human survival and advancement that kept coming out of the Near East. These included, in rapid succession, millet, rye, and spelt, among the edible cereals; flax, which provided fibers and edible oil; and a variety of fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. In every instance, the plant was undoubtedly domesticated in the Near East for millennia before it reached Europe. It was as though the Near East were some kind of genetic-botanical laboratory, guided by an unseen hand, producing every so often a newly domesticated plant.

  The scholars who have studied the origins of the grapevine have concluded that its cultivation began in the mountains around northern Mesopotamia and in Syria and Palestine. No wonder. The Old Testament tells us that Noah "planted a vineyard" (and even got drunk on its wine) after his ark rested on Mount Ararat as the waters of the Deluge receded. The Bible, like the scholars, thus places the start of vine cultivation in the mountains of northern Mesopotamia.

  Apples, pears, olives, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts - all originated in the Near East and spread from there to Europe and other parts of the world. Indeed, we cannot help recalling that the Old Testament preceded our scholars by several millennia in identifying the very same area as the world's first orchard: "And the Lord God planted an orchard in Eden, in the east. . . . And the Lord God caused; to grow, out of the ground, every tree that is pleasant to behold and that is good for eating." The general location of "Eden" was certainly known to the biblical generations. It was "in the east" - east of the Land of Israel. It was in a land watered by four major rivers, two of which are the Tigris and the Euphrates.