Journeys to the Mythical Past

by Zecharia Sitchin

  The principal “attraction” in the Museum is, of course, the mummified corpse of the Iceman. It is kept in a special sealed room, where the temperature is always –6° Celsius and the humidity is also controlled. A window is provided, through which visitors can view the body. The Iceman, with his dried-out skin now dark brown, lies in grotesque contortion, holding his wooden staff with both hands (plate 25). Did he stumble and fall like that, or was he defending himself when he froze to death?

  Standing there gazing at the oldest discovered intact human body, one is seized with those and other questions, both practical and philosophical; but there is not much time given there for that, for the line of curious visitors behind you presses forward and does not let you linger at the viewing window.

  Elsewhere in the Museum, video screens tell the Iceman’s story, and the physical objects found with the corpse are on display. The garments he wore are laid out in the order in which he would have put them on; fig. 72 is the Museum’s idea how he had looked fully clothed. His weapons and tools are also on view. Captions identify each object, and the “Record Guides” provide explanations as one stops at each display.

  The visitor is unavoidably impressed by the quality and practicality —some say “sophistication”—of the physical objects from a time that has been usually considered a primitive backward “Stone Age.” The garments were made, and worn, to provide maximum warmth. The shoes were shaped and fitted for walking in snow (fig. 73a). The bow was made of Yew wood that is the best for longbows; the arrows were “feathered”; the leather pouch, that hung from his garment, contained herbal remains that suggested it was a medicinal kit; and so on and on. True to the Museum’s announced purpose, the exhibits extend beyond the Iceman and deal with the area in general—its climate, its people, and their cultures in antiquity, thus putting the Iceman in the context of his environment and his time—leaving no doubt that his time was the Neolithic, the final phase of the Stone Age.

  Figure 72

  Before leaving, I said Hello to the Museum’s director, Dr. Angelika Fleckinger, with whom I had corresponded ahead of the visit. It would be interesting, I suggested to her, to also have a comparative display, or at least a panel, showing the state of civilization elsewhere—Mesopotamia, Near East, Egypt, the Mediterranean basin—at the Iceman’s time. This, I admitted to her, was my main interest: How did the Iceman’s culture and technology compare to Sumerians or Egyptians of 3300 B.C. Typical of the need for specialization in an archaeological or anthropological segment to attain academic job advancement, she was an obvious expert on Stone Age Europe yet hardly familiar with Near Eastern archaeology; but she agreed that a “World Culture Map” might be a worthwhile future addition to the displays. If one was ever put up, I don’t really know.

  No one leaves the Museum without taking one more final look at the Iceman, and no one can avoid wondering: What was he doing so high up in the Alps? Presumably, he lived in one of the villages in the valley at the foothills of the mountains; so why did he go where he was found? Who really was he?

  The questions have preoccupied the legion of scientists and researchers that have examined the find in every conceivable manner in the ensuing years. The series of tests, including X-rays and CAT-scans, began in Innsbruck, with experts and scientists from Vienna, from Germany, and from Switzerland called in during the very first weeks; the list then expanded to scientists and experts from Italy, and then from Britain, the U.S.A., Australia, and other parts of the world.

  Over the years, the Iceman, his body, his skin, his innards, his clothing, his tools, his weapons—he and everything about him, on him, and with him have been examined in any conceivable manner of advanced technology. Varied DNA tests were conducted; Oetzi’s stomach was pumped for his undigested last meal; the bacterial contents of his guts were studied; his colon was examined for fecal remains (they contained parasitic worms). His bones were tested (he suffered from arthritis). His teeth’s enamel was examined for its strontium-to-lead proportions (to reveal his diet and climate conditions). The straw mantle, that he wore over the skins coat, was tested not only for age and provenance, but was also studied for the method of its knotting (fig. 73b). The metal of his axe was scanned and analyzed; blood on his arrowheads was tested. The results revealed that the chance find was a veritable time capsule, providing rich information about the man and his humanfolk in that part of the world 5,300 years ago. The resulting conclusions and theories were also varied, diverse, and even contradictory.

  Figure 73

  His age, originally assumed to have been between 25 to 35, was upped—by some, to at least 45; he was about 5'5" tall, weighing about 65 kg (135 lbs). His skeleton and DNA were akin to those who have been living in the area to this day. The early notion that he was a shepherd was discarded after DNA tests of blood on his knife and arrowheads indicated that the blood came from other persons as well. New X-ray scans revealed an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder; so it is now presumed that he was involved in a fight, that a comrade was with him when he lay down or fell. Tattoo marks—lines and dots—were found on his skin; did they signify a rank, social status, or (as some suggest) a religious aspect?

  The latter suggestion has been reinforced by what some consider to be the most puzzling object in the “backpack”: A small disc of polished stone, pierced in its center, through which it was attached to a tassel of strings. Was this a piece of jewelry—or some kind of talisman, something to ward off an “evil eye,” and thus a glimpse of a primitive religion?

  In the valleys at the foothills of the Alps, where the Iceman is now presumed to have lived until his mountain escapade, only mute stone tools were found from his time; there was no Cave Art, no petroglyphs, not even Fat Ladies . . . And so, all assumptions beyond the discovered physical objects are pure speculation.

  We left Bolzano and its Iceman with several lingering questions. Why, for example, did the Sumerians at that time write on clay tablets, have high-rise temples, process metals in kilns, ferment barley to make beer, wear woven colored garments—while the Iceman needed flints to make fire? Everything about him—his clothing, his tools, his weapons—indicated high intelligence and the ability to utilize to the maximum all that was available; but what we call “technology” was way backward compared to the Sumerians of the same time. So what accounts for the difference?

  To me it was a question no different from that asked in my very first book, The 12th Planet: Why did the Aborigines in Australia remain Aborigines to the day of their discovery in modern times? “All that we know we were taught by the Anunnaki,” a Sumerian inscription stated; the intervention of the Anunnaki “gods” was again the only plausible answer; it was they, as the ancient texts repeatedly asserted, who gave mankind its first three civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley). Where they didn’t, Man wore straw shoes in the Alps and straw skirts in Bushman Africa.

  Another question concerns the issue of physical evidence of who was here and who knew what in prehistoric time: Would this unique find ever become available to scientific study were it not for Spindler’s noticing of the “bronze” axe? Such a question similarly arose in other circumstances. Important inscribed stone tablets have been found imbedded in the walls of village abodes near ancient sites in the Near East, discovered because an archaeologist with a trained eye noticed the tablet by chance. A unique stone bowl with markings that emulate Sumerian cuneiform writing was used by a farmer in Bolivia, who had found it, as a water trough for his pigs, until someone qualified noticed the writing. What if scholars with a keen eye would not have chanced upon these objects? What if the villagers had no use for them and had just thrown them away?

  We know that what has been found is a fraction of what had been—lost because of the deteriorating passage of time, natural calamities, and incessant wars. How much of what survived was found, how much of that was discarded, and how much of the remainder ended up being reported, studied—and put on display?

  8

 
INSIGHTS TO HISTORY

  The second ranking museum of Egyptian antiquities, after the one in Cairo, is neither in Egypt nor in any one of the world’s great capitals. It is the Egyptian Museum in Turin—an industrial city in northern Italy, a city that is way out of the “Tour Italy” loop. When visitors do go to Turin, hardly any go there for its Egyptian artifacts; they go there to see the venerated Shroud of Turin—the purported burial cloth in which the body of Jesus was wrapped after he had died on the cross. My Italy Expedition group went to Turin to see both.

  Turin is a short train ride from our assembly point, Milan—Italy’s second largest city; and no sooner did we arrive in Milan than we were told the good news: The restoration of one of the world’s most famous paintings was completed in time for the Holy Year 2000, and after being off limits for a long time it could be viewed again. It was thus, several years before the painting became the focus of a bestselling book phenomenon, that we were among the first to see the restored Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in one of Milan’s oldest churches.

  As diverse and different as the objects in the three locations are, they had a great deal in common: They linked newer Faiths with older ones, B.C. with A.D., the Past with the Present. When I saw all three almost at once—in the course of just two days—insights suddenly loomed as if a secret code was divulged, linking the Past with the Future.

  Turin’s Museo Egizio, appropriately located in Accademia della Scienze Street in what is deemed the city’s most characteristic domed building, has more than 30,000 artifacts from ancient Egypt, some dating back to 3500 B.C. Its establishment in 1824 was a result of Europe’s growing interest in “Egyptian art” after Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1799. He took with him to Egypt scores of scientists, engineers, draftsmen, historians, painters, and scholars from varied fields of learning for a concerted effort to find, assemble, and record the glories of ancient Egypt. The discovered temples, monuments, statues, and other artifacts were meticulously described and pictorially depicted in the multi-volume series of prints known as the Description de l’Egypte—books that still serve as a foundation of Egyptology.

  It so happened that the French Consul General in Cairo during the years 1803–1820, Bernardino Drovetti, was a native of the Piedmont area of northern Italy of which Turin is the regional capital. An avid collector of Egyptian artifacts, he shipped back to Turin whatever he could lay his hands on. His collection of more than 8,000 objects—grand statues, other sculptures, stelas, sarcophagi, mummies, amulets, and a treasure of inscribed papyri—formed the core of the Museum’s collection and is an important part of the exhibits to this day.

  The Museum boasts as a highlight of its tourist attractions the Tomb of Kha who was the chief architect of the Pharaoh Amenhotep II of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The Italian archaeologists who discovered the tomb in 1906 dismantled it with all its wall paintings and furnishings and reconstructed it, with all its contents, in the Turin museum; and one can see there the shroud-wrapped deceased, his sarcophagus, his garments, and his grooming items just as when he was entombed 3,500 years ago. Another find on exhibit is actually dated to 3500 B.C.; it is a unique piece of cloth that has on it a painting of boats and hunting scenes. There is also a reconstructed temple from Nubia. The array of statuary is grandiose. But it was a crumbling papyrus, part of the original Drovetti Collection, that was the center of my attention.

  When Drovetti was shipping “Egyptian art” back to Turin, ancient Egyptian writing—hieroglyphics—was still undeciphered. It was one of Napoleon’s officers who found in a village called Rosetta a stone tablet on which an edict of king Ptolemy V was inscribed in three languages—ancient Hieroglyphic, late Egyptian Demotic, and Greek; it was this Rosetta Stone (fig. 74, now in the British Museum) that enabled a young French linguist, Jean-Francois Champollion, to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822. After the Turin Museum was established a couple of years later, Champollion was invited to examine its trove of inscribed objects; it was he who was first to recognize the immense importance of the papyrus that has since become known as the Turin King List.

  Figure 74

  Students of Egyptian history—and readers of my books—are familiar with the name Manetho. He was an Egyptian priest in the third century B.C. who was commissioned by Ptolemy I (the first Greek ruler of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great) to write, in Greek, a comprehensive history of Egypt. The resulting work, which listed Egypt’s Pharaohs by dynasties, stated that before the human kings Egypt was ruled by demigods; and before them, seven gods—starting with the god Ptah—reigned over the land for 12,300 years.

  In time, modern archaeologists discovered Egyptian king lists that corroborate Manetho’s listings. One, from the fourteenth century B.C., is depicted on the walls of the temple of Seti I in Abydos (fig. 75); it shows this Nineteenth Dynasty king with his son, the future famed Ramses II, facing the inscribed names of the dynastic Pharaohs who had reigned before them. Another, known as the Palermo Stone because it is in the Palermo Museum on the island of Sicily, begins the listings with the gods who reigned before the demigods and the human kings. Though what is extant is a fragment of a larger stela (and even the fragment has been damaged by its use as a peasant’s doorstop before its importance was realized), it is certain that the list exactly matches Manetho’s from the divine beginnings through the end of the Fifth Dynasty—which dates this stone document to circa 2400 B.C. And then there is the Turin Papyrus, that also begins with the divine list—starting with the god Ptah, followed by the other gods, then the demigods, and then the Pharaohs. It is dated to circa 1250 B.C.

  There is thus no doubt that what Manetho had written about Ptah and the other divine rulers of the Lands of the Nile was based on earlier canonical documentation in Egypt—millennia-old traditions that corroborate my assertions (see especially The Wars of Gods and Men) that the gods of Egypt and of Mesopotamia were the same Anunnaki: Ptah in Egypt was one and the same god called Enki by the Sumerians; his firstborn son Marduk in Mesopotamia was Ra in Egypt; his other son Ningishzidda was the god Thoth in Egypt, and so on. Ptah was held in both civilizations to have been the one who fashioned Man through genetic engineering. He was the one, I wrote in my books, who had suggested to the other Anunnaki leaders what the Bible states: “Let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).

  Figure 75

  Imagine thus my delight when we came upon a beautiful statue of a bearded Ptah—unusual in that the stone surface has a metallic glow, giving the god’s staff a golden hue (plate 26)—with his hieroglyphic name prominently carved on it, looking like an entwined cord (fig. 76). It is, I explained to my group, a stylization of the more elaborate Entwined Serpents symbol which, in turn, represented (we now know) the double-helix DNA—the emblem of medicine and healing to this day. Holding in his hands the Ankh sign of Life, the statue depicted Ptah/Enki as the god of genetic engineering.

  Egyptian finds, Mesopotamian texts and depictions, and the tales of Genesis in the Bible, were coming together.

  Figure 76

  To millions around the world, Turin is known as the home of the Shroud of Turin—a length of cloth, some fourteen feet long and less than four feet wide, presumed to be the shroud in which (as stated in the Gospel of Mark 15:44–46) the body of Jesus was wrapped after he was taken down from the cross and carried to a tomb hewn out of the rocks.

  When the length of linen cloth is spread out, it appears to bear markings as those of a crucified body, front and back, of a man with his hands folded down. Where, according to the gospels’ description of the crucifixion of Jesus, his hands and feet were nailed to the cross by the Roman soldiers, bleeding wounds seem to have left their imprint on the shroud. The image is best realized when viewed as a negative, when it shows a tall bearded and moustached man, middle-aged, as in this photograph of the shroud’s front image in negative (fig. 77).

  Figure 77

  The “Shroud of Turin” became associated with Turi
n only in 1578, when it was acquired by the Duke Emanuele Filiberto of the House of Savoy and brought to Turin. Before that it was in France, where it was kept—and exhibited on and off—since it was brought, purportedly from the island of Cyprus, circa 1350. It is first mentioned in writing in a 1389 letter from the Bishop of Troyes to the Pope, complaining that a fourteen-foot length of linen is being displayed in a church in the town of Lirey in France and “although it is not publicly stated to be the true shroud of Christ, nevertheless this is given out and noised so in private.” The Bishop additionally reported to the Pope that his predecessor had ascertained that “the image is cunningly painted . . . a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”

  The first recorded mention of the shroud was thus coupled with doubt about its authenticity—a fate that has accompanied the shroud to this day. But in spite of the Bishop’s assertion that the shroud was not a relic from the time of Jesus, the shroud attracted multitudes of Believers and local nuns attributed to it miraculous healing powers. In 1578 the royal House of Savoy acquired the shroud, moved it to Turin, housed it in a special chapel, and commissioned famed painters to depict the shroud in religious-art style; one (fig. 78) even shows the shroud being repaired.

  Figure 78

  Until the invention of photography, the paintings served as a powerful visual means to propagate the shroud and infer to it religious sacredness. The first photograph of the relic was taken in 1898, and the fact that its negative was clearer than the positive launched suggestions that the image on the shroud is itself some kind of a negative imprint miraculously deposited on the cloth. As both veneration and doubts continued, the Church permitted in 1978 some scientific examination of the shroud; it was reported to have confirmed its authenticity. A decade later the cutting off of a postage-stamp size piece of the cloth for carbon dating was allowed; it dated it to “1260–1390 A.D.” The disappointing result was duly challenged, and in 1993 a re-examination suggested that bacteria, mold, or a fire in 1532 affected the carbon dating result by some 1300 years—pushing the age of the cloth back to the time of Jesus. Other varied tests and analyses that followed kept the conclusions swinging back and forth—and the controversy continues . . .