Journeys to the Mythical Past

by Zecharia Sitchin

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  Thousands of cylinder seals or their imprints have been found throughout the ancient Near East; every museum boasts some; scores of scholarly books and catalogues list, copy, and depict them. In the course of my researches, I have studied and examined about three thousand of them; of particular interest to me were seals adorned with celestial scenes or heavenly symbols. One day I came across a seal drawing which boggled the mind: it was of cylinder seal VA/243 in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. Scholars said that the scene on it was “mythological”—depicting the grant of the plough to Mankind by the god of farming. But the celestial scene with which it was adorned (fig. 91) showed a star surrounded by planets—a solar system!

  The year was 1971. The Vorderasiatisches Museum was in what was then East Berlin, behind the “Iron Curtain.” I wrote a letter to the Museum, asking for a photograph and any available information and enclosed $10 to cover costs and fees. To my surprise, I received an answer—a letter enclosing a glossy photograph to which a caption (“Sumerian cylinder seal, c. 2500 B.C.”) was attached (fig. 92). The letter, signed by the Museum’s Director, listed a brief bibliography of published data. Research based on that left no doubt:

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  Some 4,500 years ago—thousands of years before the invention of the telescope—a Sumerian artist depicted our complete solar system, with its star—the Sun—in the center.

  Years later, after The 12th Planet was published, an Internet chat group discussing the book sought the opinion of a noted astronomer regarding the VA/243 seal. “It is undoubtedly a depiction of a solar system,” he posted back, “but since there is no way the Sumerians could have known that 6,000 years ago, it must be a depiction of another solar system.”

  When I was sent a copy of those exchanges, I wrote back on the margin: “Wow! Wow! Wow! Does he realize what he has just said? That there was no way the Sumerians could know about our solar system, but they knew the makeup of another one—one which we have yet to discover!”

  No, it was obvious from the very beginning that this was a depiction of our solar system. But how could the telescopeless Sumerians have known all that? The only plausible answer was: from their Anunnaki teachers. A comparison of the ancient depiction (fig. 93a) to a sketch I made of the solar system as known to us (showing the planets surrounding the Sun rather than stretched out from it fig. 93b), immediately indicated a major difference: the ancients included a sizable planet between Mars and Jupiter—where we have none. What we show in that space between Mars and Jupiter is the Asteroid Belt—a band of debris, the remains of a smashed planet.

  That glaring difference bespoke the source of the ancient celestial knowledge, for the “extra” planet was Nibiru, the Home Planet of the Anunnaki.

  And so, all at once, by finding seal VA/243, “pictorial” confirmation was provided for the tale in the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation. The text, inscribed on seven tablets, has been treated by scholars as an allegorical tale; I have treated it in The 12th Planet as a sophisticated cosmogony of our solar system’s formation and the “celestial battle” between an invading planet (“Nibiru”) which collided with and broke up the planet “Tiamat” to form out of her Earth and the “Hammered Bracelet” (the Asteroid Belt). As illustrated in my book, the sequence of events ended up with the capture of Nibiru into solar orbit (fig. 94), resulting in its return—once in about 3,600 Earth-years—to the Crossing Place, between Mars and Jupiter.

  The 4,500-year-old depiction thus showed our complete solar system—Sun, Earth and the Moon, the eight other known planets (Pluto included!!!) and Nibiru, making a total of twelve (hence the first book’s title).

  I had visited Berlin while it was divided between West and East, at which time the tour bus kept a respectful distance from the notorious Berlin Wall at the legendary Checkpoint Charlie. But no sooner did the Wall fall than I was back, rushing in a “Western” Berlin taxi through the strange eastern part to the Museum. After a few inquiries, I was directed to the section where, inside a glass-faced display case devoted to cylinder seals, the all-important cylinder seal was on display. VA/243 was real!

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  In 1991 I was back in Berlin with a camera crew, filming in the Vorderasiatisches Museum video footage for a documentary based on my book Genesis Revisited and titled Are We Alone? The permit negotiated by the Swiss-based producers with the Museum allowed us to come in each day for a week two hours before the public opening, and clear out by opening time. Each day the Director—Frau Doktor JakobProst—was up in arms because we didn’t leave on time; each next day she acceded to our requests to film this or do that. One of those particular requests was to film a demonstration of how a cylinder seal is actually rolled on wet clay to leave the positive imprint. I suggested that we use seal VA/243 in the demonstration; but when all was set up for that, the Museum employee showed up with another seal; VA/243 was too important, they explained, to be risked.

  Over the years, the Museum was visited by hundreds of my readers eager to see the seal, and its image was used and shown in countless articles and TV programs all over the world. But as far as my own “close encounter” with it was concerned, the filming in Berlin in 1991 was the last time—until an unexpected encounter in May 2000.

  It was soon after returning home from the eventful visit to Italy during the Vatican’s Holy Year 2000 that I found in the mail a large flat envelope from one of my longtime fans, Joanne N. “You’ll get a kick out of this,” she wrote in a note attached to several pages clipped from Sky & Telescope, a monthly magazine devoted to astronomy. A color photograph immediately caught my eye: it was a photograph of the original 1976 cover of my first book, The 12th Planet (plate 31)!

  It was, as I later reported in my website, “an encounter with an old friend” and quite a surprise: What was it doing, after twenty-four years, in Sky & Telescope?

  A closer look at the pages revealed that the photo was provided by an astronomer, E. C. Krupp, for his article “Lost Worlds” in the magazine. His subject was the misconceived predictions of planetary dooms, such as the then hullabaloo about the End of the World on May 5, 2000. Though I had absolutely nothing to do with those predictions, Dr. Krupp found the opportunity to deal—after a quarter of a century!—with “a different astronomical misconception”—my interpretation of cylinder seal VA/243 . . .

  “Zecharia Sitchin’s books,” the article explained, are “about ancient space colonists from a lost ‘twelfth planet’ that once violently invaded our solar system.” Lamenting (or conceding?) that “credulous readers are persuaded by Sitchin that the traditions of ancient Sumer validate this unorthodox reconstruction of solar system history,” the article declared that

  Sitchin’s case originates in an Akkadian cylinder seal from the third millennium B.C., a portion of which features a six-pointed star surrounded by eleven dots of varying size. Sitchin judged that the star symbolizes the Sun and the smaller elements are supposedly planets, including the lost 12th world.

  The ancient depiction and my interpretation of it have embarrassed astronomers from the very beginning, because it was just not possible for the ancient peoples to have known about the post-Saturn planets, to say nothing about one more yet-unknown planet; and my explanation that the knowledge was provided by Extraterrestrials who had come to Earth made my viewpoint an even greater anathema to the scientific establishment. So now, finally—after a quarter of a century!—a noted astronomer, head of a major observatory in California, has come up with an antidote. As the magazine summed up in a sidebar, the ancient depiction of our complete solar system could be interpreted differently:

  Several other interpretations of the symbols may be entertained. They could easily represent a bright planet—such as Jupiter—in the midst of familiar stars. In fact, the arrangement around the starlike object roughly resembles the Teapot of Sagittarius.

&n
bsp; My purported evidence for the ancients’ impossible knowledge, the article stated, was no evidence at all, because what the seal depicts is the known bright planet Jupiter, shown passing within the Teapot of the well-known constellation of Sagittarius; hence, if the central “star” is not the Sun but the planet Jupiter, and the surrounding dots not planets but stars that make up the constellation of Sagittarius, there is no need for extraordinary knowledge, no Extraterrestrial teachers, no Anunnaki, no 12th planet, no Sitchin misconceptions!

  Two illustrations alongside the sidebar’s text illustrated the article’s point (plate 32). One purported to illustrate what I claimed—not badly, but certainly not exactly the way it was depicted on the cylinder seal or in my drawings, and conveniently omitting the mysterious planet between Mars and Jupiter. The other outlined the Teapot using the cylinder seal depiction to “connect the dots,” to show how it resembled Jupiter seen within Sagittarius.

  This out-of-the-blue critique of my understanding of cylinder seal VA/243, even after a quarter of a century, was a weighty matter. Sky & Telescope is a prestigious journal. Dr. Krupp, then head of the Griffith Observatory in California, was a respected astronomer and the author of several books—some actually quoted in my books. His alternative interpretation of the ancient seal could not be taken lightly.

  I have of course known that Sagittarius is one of the twelve zodiacal constellations; it was known to the Sumerians, was called by them PA.BIL (“The Defender”) and was depicted by them as an Archer (fig. 95)—a name and a depiction retained to this day. But what the heck was its “Teapot”?

  I looked it up in my books on astronomy and found out that some modern astronomers (while having afternoon tea?) decided that the central part of Sagittarius resembles a teapot: a “spout” formed by connecting the constellation’s stars Al Nasi, Kaus Media, and Kaus Australis (also designated Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon); a “handle” shaped by the stars designated Zeta (Ascella), Tau, Sigma (Nunki), and Phi; and a “lid” indicated by Kaus Borealis (Lambda).

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  I made a copy of a star map of Sagittarius, and drew on it lines to connect the above named stars as dots, in the manner that the article had used the planets in the ancient depiction to “connect the dots”; I then placed the resulting sketch next to the dot-connecting illustration in the magazine (fig. 96). Did they look alike? Yes? No? Not really? As I kept on comparing, I began to wonder: Where is Jupiter, supposedly passing in the center of Sagittarius, within the Teapot?

  And then, as I noticed the line indicating “Ecliptic” (the plane in which the planets orbit the Sun), the realization hit me: Jupiter is not there because Jupiter could never be there! Jupiter orbits the Sun almost precisely in the Ecliptic; it NEVER strays south to EVER have a conjunction with the center of Sagittarius; it can never be within the Teapot!

  I checked this astounding finding with friends who are amateur astronomers. I checked with the Planetarium of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I checked with the prestigious Palmer Planetarium in Chicago. They confirmed my conclusion—in writing. There was no doubt: The counter solution proposed in Sky & Telescope was an impossibility, and my original interpretation remained standing unchallenged.

  I then wrote a Letter to the Editor to the journal, politely pointing it all out. The letter was not published. But after some time, I received a response—a two page letter from Dr. Krupp himself. Written on the Observatory’s letterhead and dated 4 August 2000, it said:

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  It is a delight to hear from you. I have all your books, have read most of them, and have listened to you on the radio a couple of times. I have of course dedicated thought to the arguments you have developed. Although your handling of the data has inspired my skepticism, please let me acknowledge the courtesy and logic of your complaint about the way I evaluated your Twelfth Planet notions in my monthly column on astronomy and culture in Sky & Telescope.

  You are correct to point out that I was hasty in offering Sagittarius as an option for the imagery on the Akkadian cylinder seal VA/243. Certainly we cannot regard the figure as an accurate map of the Teapot with Jupiter brewing inside. If you allow me Saturn, we get a little closer; but you are right—no tea caddied planet. My caption highlights Jupiter, positions it within Sagittarius, and suggests a real mapping. Your objection is sustained.

  So, if he was wrong (“hasty,” he called it), was I right after all? Not yet—as the letter continued:

  Of course, there are other candidates among the stars. A planet could have been in the vicinity of Leo, for example, enclosed by Regulus, gamma Leonis, zeta Leonis, epsilon Leonis, alpha Canceri, 38 Canceri, zeta Hydrae, and iota Hydra. Given the lack of precision on the cylinder seal, that set of stars works pretty well. If they be unacceptable, however, we can alternatively imagine a planet in a larger enclosure.

  Should I have said “Wow! Wow! Wow!” again? Gotten angry that there was no apology? Instead, I wrote the distinguished astronomer as follows:

  It truly chagrins me that someone like you, in searching for explanations for the seal’s depictions (you list some of the most improbable ones in your letter) would not even consider our solar system as a possibility. This can only stem from an absolute refusal to accept the Extraterrestrial nature of the Anunnaki. But why would someone—I am sure you are included—who would deem it possible that Man from Earth would one day travel to another planet, deem it totally unacceptable that someone from another planet might have come here?

  I signed the letter “Looking forward to a dialogue with you.” But as far as the others were concerned, the matter was closed.

  In retrospect, my rhetorical question to a modern stargazer stated the issue of elitist shunning of “Extraterrestrials” in a nutshell: If we will be able someday to send our astronauts to another planet—why is it inconceivable that the reverse could—and did—happen?

  In February 1971 the United States launched an unmanned spacecraft on a journey whose ultimate destination was outer space. Named Pioneer 10, it traveled for twenty-one months, past Mars and the Asteroid Belt, to a precisely scheduled rendezvous with Jupiter. There the great gravitational forces of Jupiter grabbed the spacecraft and thrust it out into outer space. On the 25th anniversary of Pioneer 10’s departure from Earth, it crossed the outermost boundary of our Sun’s realm and was still coursing to destinations unknown—perhaps to tell some “Extraterrestrial” out there that the tiny planet in a certain solar system has intelligent beings who wish to say Hello.

  No, this is not my fantasy. Serious scientists attached to Pioneer 10 a plaque bearing such message (fig. 97). In sign language, it informs whomever it will encounter that it comes from the third planet in a solar system in a certain galaxy, from which intelligent beings, male and female, send greetings.

  “We may never know whether, countless years from now, someone on another planet will find and understand the message drawn on the plaque attached to Pioneer 10,” I wrote in 1976 in The 12th Planet. “Likewise, one would think it futile to expect to find on Earth such a plaque in reverse . . . Yet, such extraordinary evidence does exist!”

  The evidence, I then wrote, is a plaque conveying to Earthlings information regarding the location and the route from the 12th Planet to Earth. It is a round plaque that was discovered in the ruins of the royal library of Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, and is on view in the British Museum in London. Though catalogued (BM K-8538) as a clay disc, it has a gray metallic coloring to it, and where it is damaged it appears to have been damaged by fire—most unusual, for clay hardens in fire rather than softens and bends as had happened to this artifact.

  Figure 97

  The undamaged portions of the disc are covered with cuneiform signs, together with arrows, triangles, intersecting lines, and even an ellipse (a geometric shape supposedly unknown in antiquity). In 1912 L. W. King, then curator of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities in the British Museum, made a meticulous copy of the signs, showing that the disc was pr
ecisely divided into eight segments (fig. 98).

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  The cuneiform writing clearly included the names of stars and planets, so no wonder that the unusual artifact was first discussed at sessions of the British Royal Astronomical Society, which designated it to be a 360° Planisphere—the reproduction on a flat surface of the heavens enveloping the Earth as a sphere. Yet, for reasons of its own, the Museum displays this unusual artifact in the section devoted to Writing, rather than as part of its great Mesopotamian collection. This has enabled me to first guide my groups through the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian displays spread over three floors and gradually introduce them to the evidence about the Anunnaki “gods,” and then take them to see the separately displayed conclusive item—this “clay” disc.

  “Conclusive” because what has been inscribed and described on this millennia-old document is a skymap, in which the Anunnaki showed and literally told Mankind: This is how we journey between our planet and yours.

  Without repeating the extensive analysis of the planisphere given in The 12th Planet, suffice it to say here that the most compelling segment is the one with two connected triangular shapes. Its writing, when translated (fig. 99), consists of celestial navigation terminology with topographic landing directions on the segment’s margins, and provides in the center an unmistakable route map from a mountainous planet to our segment of the solar system. The connecting line indicates a course correction or detour between two planets—Kakkab DILGAN (“Planet Jupiter”) and Kakkab APIN (“Planet Mars”); the inscription where seven dots are depicted states in the clearest possible way: “Deity Enlil went by the planets.”