The continuation is known as Babylonian King List A. The beginning, the names and dates of the first dynasty, is illegible. King List B fills the gap. It contains the names of the kings of the first Babylonian dynasty (1830-1530). Thus we know, insofar as they are legible—the teeth of time have been at work—the names of the Sumerian and Babylonian rulers and the dates of their reigns!
Was the Sumerian mystery solved by the lucky find of the King Lists? Not a bit of it! That was when the trouble really started.
According to WB 444, the first ten kings ruled from the creation to the Deluge, a total of 456,000 years. Yes, you’d better read that twice, it’s not a misprint! In words, four hundred and fifty-six thousand years! After the Deluge ‘the kingship came down from heaven again’. The 23 kings who then succeeded each other to the throne still managed to clock up reigns lasting 24,510 years, three months and three and a half days. Quite a few years!
Although officially the King Lists are ‘catalogues of the kings and their reigns arranged by dynasties,’45 scholars felt that there was something wrong somewhere. Only Sir Leonard Woolley who went on busily excavating in Sumerian soil came to believe in the King Lists, even though he himself could not explain them.43 Our archaeologists find the years given for the various reigns too astronomical.
I admit that according to old standards they do not admit of any firm conclusions.
But before I put forward my speculations about these lengthy reigns and their problems, I must at least introduce my readers to a selection from the King Lists. The list going back to the creation of man would fill several pages and be completely unnecessary in this context.
Examples from King List WB 444:
When the kingship came down from heaven,
the kingship was in Eridu.
Alulim was king in Eridu.
He reigned 28,800 years.
Alalgar reigned 36,000 years.
Two kings,
they ruled 64,800 years.
In Bad-Bad-tibira En-men-lu-anna
ruled 43,200 years,
En-men-gal-anna
ruled 28,800 years.
En-men-dur-anna was king
in Sippar, he ruled 21,000 years.
One king,
he ruled his 21,000 years.
In Suruppak Ubar-tutu was king,
he ruled 18,600 years.
Five cities,
Eight kings,
they ruled 241,200 years.
The Deluge came down.
After the Deluge came down,
and the kingship came down
from heaven (again),
God Dumuzi, the shepherd,
ruled 36,000 years.
Three kings,
They ruled their 108,000 years.
In Larak En-zib-zi-anna
ruled 28,000 years.
Atab ruled 600 years,
Atab’s son ruled 840 years.
ETANA, the shepherd,
who rose up to heaven,
who fortified the counties,
was king.
He ruled 1,560 years
Balih,
son of Etana,
ruled 400 years.
Tizkar, son of Samug,
ruled 305 years.
Ilta-sadum
ruled 1,200 years.
(Mes)-kiag-ga(ser),
son of the Sun God,
was high priest
the kingship was in Kis.
In Kis Ga-ur was king,
he ruled 1,200 years.
Gulla-Nidaba-anna-pad
ruled 960 years.
Zukakip
ruled 900 years.
(and king), (he ruled)
324 years.
The divine Lugal-banda, the shepherd,
ruled 1,200 years.
God Dumu-zi, the fisherman,
his town is Kua,
ruled 100 years.
The divine GILGAMESH,
his father was a Lillu demon,
high priest of Kullab,
ruled 126 years.
Ur-nungal, son of GILGAMESH,
ruled 30 years.
Utul-kalamma, son of Ur-nungal,
ruled 15 years,
Labaser
ruled 9 years.
The King Lists are also lists of gods, to some extent. Kings, who were not only worshipped as gods by the Sumerians, but also recognised as teachers, figure in them. Gilgamesh, Etana and Enkidu were heroes of famous epics which bear their names. Names from the King Lists were also found on cuneiform clay tablets and seals, which proves that the lists were not a product of the imagination of one or more chroniclers. The kings did exist and their influence was ‘stamped’, as it were, on everyday life.
But what is the meaning of the incredibly long reigns of the crowned heads?
Friedrich Schmidtke46 writes of the confusion in which Sumerologists find themselves:
‘At first glance it looks as if the dynasties ruled one after another, which would lead to impossible consequences as far as the duration of Sumerian history is concerned.’
In scholarly circles, they wonder what can have impelled the chroniclers of the King Lists to put down ‘such impossible figures’.46 Before Professor Schmidtke presents the tables with the names and dates of the Sumerian and Babylonian kings, his sense of resignation shows through:
‘The contents of WB before this lie in the realm of saga and need not concern us here, however interesting the antediluvian dynasties are for the history of religion.’
Should these startling datings be relegated to the kingdom of fable and legend? Should we make things so easy that anything that is not immediately explicable goes to the shunting yard and is then addressed to the terminus labelled fable + legend?
Does this mean that everything that we do not understand must be attributed to the great magician, chance?
WB 444 registers ten original kings from the creation of the earth to the Deluge. Altogether they reigned for 456,000 years.
The Bible names ten patriarchs from the creation of Adam to the Flood45 and these gentlemen, too, lived to an astonishingly old age.
Pablo Picasso, who had his daughter Paloma when he was 68, was a young man compared with Adam, the first man, who is supposed to have produced his first son at the age of 130. And in comparison with Adam, who is reputed to have lived for more than 900 years, Picasso was a mere strippling when he died aged 92.
Enoch, the antediluvian prophet and seventh of the ten patriarchs, can expect an even more astonishing span of years. He did not die at all, but was taken to heaven by God. Methuselah, his son, the patriarch immediately before the Flood, died at the blessed age of 969.
If you ask gerontologists about the reliability of reports of abnormally high ages, American and Russian specialists are unanimous in saying that nature has fixed the age of man at 110 to 120 years. The constantly publicised reports of the legendary Bulgarian shepherd who has reached the age of 150—once again—belong to the realm of fairytales. When anyone tries to justify the truth of such reports, there are no supporting documents of any kind that show the date of birth. Old wives’ tales . . .
Our life span is determined by the functioning of the 15 milliard cells in our bodies. The cells divide in the course of life and keep on rebuilding our bodies. With each division we slowly approach our end—from the age of 20 onwards, for the intensity of cell renewal is over after 30, or at the most 50 divisions.
Man’s expectation of a ‘biblical’ age of 110 to 120 years is still only a wish, a dream . . . until gerontological research succeeds in slowing down cell degeneration. Scientists who have examined mummified tissue from early times say that men subject to different physical laws have never existed.
Knowing these undisputed facts, I cannot help asking why the Sumerian and biblical chroniclers ‘invented’ such astronomical ages for their forefathers—ages that they could not have reached according to modern science.
In the hill of El Obeid near Ur of the Chaldees,
Sir Charles Leonard Woolley found a limestone tablet with these words:
‘Dedicated by A-anni-tadda, King of Ur, son of Mes-anni-padda, King of Ur.’43
This Mes-anni-padda appears in the King Lists as founder of the third dynasty after the Deluge.
It is astonishing that certain names appear in the King Lists at different times in different dynasties, as if they had ruled more than once and had only vanished for a few centuries or millennia in the interim.
Here is an example. The Babylonian king Nabu-na’id (555-538 B.C.) says on a tablet found in the Temple of the Sun at Sippar:
‘For the sun god, the judge of heaven and earth, did I rebuild the Temple of the Sun, his house at Sippar, which Nebuchadedsae, a former king, built, and whose ancient foundations he sought, but did not find. With the passage of 45 years, the walls of that house had collapsed; at this I was sore afraid, I fell to my knees, terror seized me and my face was disturbed.
‘While I removed the god’s image from inside the temple and put it in another temple, I demolished that house, I sought the ancient foundations and I made the ground-level 18 ells deeper, and the sun god, the great lord of the Temple of the Sun, let me see the foundations of Naram-sin, the son of Sargon, which no former king had seen for 3,200 years . . .*
‘On the foundations of Naram-sin, the son of Sargon, laid I the building stones in points going neither in nor out.’
*The dots indicate omissions where the original is illegible.
King Nabu-na’id clearly states that the foundations he sought so zealously and then found 18 ells below ground-level showed that his royal ancestor Naram-sin first built the Temple of the Sun 3,200 years before his time (i.e. about 3,800 B.C.).
A remarkable thing is that the same Naram-sin, like his father Sargon, reappears in the King Lists at quite different times.
One more example: according to King Lists A and B Hammurabi reigned some 700 years before Burnaburias I. Sumerologists say that this is out of the question.
‘The statement that Hammurabi lived 700 years before Burnaburias I is quite impossible.’46
Why is it impossible? That is exactly what it says in the laboriously compiled King Lists!
The names of various kings are perpetuated on cuneiform clay tablets found on many sites. They state irrevocably that these monarchs did in fact rule. The inscriptions with the names are documentary evidence. The King Lists tell us which rulers were at the helm and for how long they reigned.
Now the real jigsaw puzzle begins!
Sumerologists are seriously trying to ascertain the exact chronological sequence of the dynasties and their kings. They think they can fix the dates of one king’s reign on the basis of some inscription found at some site or other.
One date is recorded and a chronological sequence running backwards and forwards is built up from it. King X was succeeded by King Y. King Y was killed in a war by King Z. Consequently King X must have lived before King Z.
And then this distant period of history plays the zealous scholars a dirty trick! Kings X, Y and Z suddenly appear on quite different clay tablets in a different series of successions to the throne and in a quite different context.
What do they do so as not to spoil the painstakingly compiled family trees?
They do what archaeologists usually do in such cases. They blame the old chroniclers for everything. Those gentlemen could not count, they say. They wrote the kings and their dates down next to each other, instead of one after another, they say. They would have us believe that the chroniclers were pretty stupid in general.
But after these limp evasions, the fact remains that the defenceless chroniclers accurately noted one reign after another in the original King Lists! It is incomprehensible why such unreliable historians were also at work in the Old Testament—listing the ten antediluvian patriarchs.
At first sight I do not find the assumption that the same chroniclers might have been at work too far fetched. The Bible and historical research agree that the young Moses, later liberator of Israel and founder of the religion of Yahweh, grew up and was educated at the court of a Pharaoh. He almost certainly had access to the splendid libraries of the second millennium B.C.
Did Moses have a look at the Sumerian King Lists? Did he commit the information to his phenomenally good memory and hand it on as part of the oral tradition? If so, why did he not take over the same figures for the ten Old Testament patriarchs that the Sumerians had inscribed next to the names of their ten antediluvian kings? One can toy with the idea that the same source may have been tapped for both our Sumerian and biblical ancestors, but on careful examination there is only one common feature: the incredible ages attributed to both kings and patriarchs. That is not enough to explain the phenomenon.
I should like to introduce three speculative explanations into the discussion:
1. From time to time the antediluvian kings were invited by extraterrestrials on journeys to other solar systems.
Impressive descriptions of such journeys are preserved in both the Zohar, the main work of the traditional Jewish Cabbala, and in the Book of Enoch, which the early Abyssinian church accepted as canonical.
The technical historian Professor Richard Hennig described certain parts of the Sumerian legend of Etana as ‘the oldest flying story in the world’. Written in cuneiform script between 3000-2500 B.C., this aerial journey was also depicted pictorially on cylinder seals. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh describes the hero’s dreamlike journey to the dwelling-place of the gods.
Aerial journeys to distant worlds are not exclusive fairytales confined to the peoples of the Middle East. They are also found in the Indian national epic Mahabharata and in the Ramayana written between the fourth and third centuries B.C. They occur in Nordic myths and Red Indian traditions. There is no national copyright for heavenly journeys with the ‘gods’.
Since Albert Einstein (1879-1955) developed his special theory of relativity, enormous figures for the beginning and end of ‘life’ have become explicable. After physical experiments, Einstein’s theory had proved to be a fact of natural law.
The eternal natural law of time dilation says neither more nor less than that for astronauts on an interstellar spaceship travelling close to the speed of light time passes more slowly than it does for the observers who stay behind at the launching ramp.
Since Einstein time is no longer a fixed dimension; it can be manipulated by energy = speed.
How do the incomprehensible Sumerian dates in the King Lists look in the light of this knowledge?
The surviving Sumerian inscriptions do not tell us about vague matters of foreign policy which could have got muddled up with the net of dates. They inform us drily about concrete events like the construction of palaces or temples, which were obviously erected for the ‘gods’ dwelling in their midst. This practice is not at all surprising, for the Sumerian kings looked on themselves merely as representatives of the ‘real’ gods. These ‘gods’ installed the kings personally, and they followed the same procedure again after the worldwide Deluge. When the floods had ebbed away, when our blue planet had become uninhabitable, ‘the kingship came down from heaven again’. That is what it says in the King List.
If this is accepted as fact, it is no longer so absurd to presume that the god-kings were either living extraterrestrials or had at least been taken backwards and forwards on flights to other systems by extraterrestrials.
The ‘impossible’ figures for the royal reigns and the assurance that the kingship came down from heaven entitle us to suspect that we are not dealing with things of this world.
When we know the effect of time dilation, the total of 456,000 years for which the ten kings ruled is no longer so disturbing. It’s a bagatelle!
2. The extraterrestrials (gods) produced sons and daughters after mating with the children of earth. So the prophet Enoch claims. That is what it says in the Lamech Scroll, which is over 2000 years old and was found in 1947 in the settlement of Chirbet Qumran near the Dead
Sea.—The Sumerian god Enlil, who reigned in Nippur, seduced the delightful Ninlil and got her with child.—Even Genesis mentions marriages between the ‘sons of God’ and the ‘daughters of men’.
The products of this unusual act of procreation could undoubtedly have told amazing details about their split inner lives on the psychiatrist’s couch. These hybrids emulated their ‘divine’ creators, probably out of envy, because according to all the traditions the ‘gods’ were immortal, whereas they had to die like the rest of the inhabitants of earth.
The descendants of the ‘gods’ produced on our earth became mortal, because once the extraterrestrials departed definitively, they no longer had a chance to take part in interstellar spaceflights at high speeds. They could no longer avoid the process of ageing.
It is quite understandable that the sons of the gods strove to overcome this vulgar mortality; understandable, too, that they ruled as long as humanly possible and insisted on their royal prerogatives. Even then the ruling classes enjoyed their power.
Signs of the Gods? Page 18