Among the Anunnaki named in the Nippur foundation cylinder is the great lord Enlil, along with Enki, whom we have already met; Utu, or Ugmash, the sun god; Anu, whose name means “heaven”; and Enlil’s (usually Enki’s) consort, Ninkharsag, a name that translates as “Lady of the Sacred Mountain.” Significantly, she appears also under the Akkadian name Šir (the equivalent of the Sumerian Muš, pronounced mush),25 meaning “Serpent,” and is given the epithet Bê-lit, meaning “Divine Lady.”26 Even though Mesopotamian scholar George A. Barton assumed that Šir was a “serpent goddess” venerated in the city of Nippur,27 O’Brien interpreted her name as meaning “Serpent Lady”28 and identified her as one of the Anunnaki living in Kharsag.
CULT OF THE SNAKE
It is curious that Ninkharsag, also called Šir (or Muš), the wife of Enlil or Enki, is seen as one of the Anunnaki living at Kharsag, for a cult of the snake is known to have thrived on the plain of Mush (which in Turkish is written Muş). A medieval translation of a work by the fourth-century Armenian abbot Zenob Glak says that snake worship was introduced to the kingdom of Taron, the ancient name of Mush, by “Hindoos,” who arrived from the east in 149 BC.29 They built cities and temples here that were destroyed by Gregory the Illuminator during his crusade against the pagans at the beginning of the fourth century AD. Apparently, the temples were located at Ashtishat, close to the road between Mush and Bingöl Mountain, where afterward Surb Karapet, the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, was built.
This story suggests that Mush derives its name from the Sumerian Muš, the Akkadian Šir (pronounced shir), both meaning “snake” (even though in Armenian popular tradition Mush, as the word mshush, means “fog,” a name deriving from a story in which the Armenian goddess Anahita raised a mist so that her daughter Astghik, goddess of love and beauty, could bathe without any mortal setting eyes on her nakedness). If so, then the ancient snake cult known to have existed at Ashtishat (the principal seat of the goddess Astghik, whose symbol was the vishap, a word meaning “snake” or “dragon”) probably predates the arrival of the “Hindoos” and most likely relates to a time when the region was under the control of one of the Mesopotamian civilizations. If so, then this has profound implications for the identification of Kharsag with Bingöl Mountain, and the Garden of Eden with the Mush Plain, for in his book The Genius of the Few, Christian O’Brien argues that the account of Kharsag preserved in the Nippur foundation cylinder was perhaps the origin of the Genesis account of the terrestrial Paradise:
The parallels between this epic account and the Hebraic record at the Garden of Eden are highly convincing. Not only is “Eden” twice mentioned, but the reference to the “Serpent Lady”, as an epithet for Ninkharsag . . . [is] clear confirmation of the scientific nature of the work carried out by the equivalent Serpents in the Hebrew account.30
We shall meet with those Serpents of Hebrew tradition shortly, but for the moment it is important to explore O’Brien’s conclusions regarding Kharsag’s identification as the original Garden of Eden. He located this mountain settlement of the Anunnaki not at Bingöl Mountain in the Armenian Highlands but at Mount Hermon (modern Jabal al-Shaykh, “Mountain of the Chief ”), which forms part of the Anti-Lebanon range and straddles the border between Syria and Lebanon, extending as far south as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
NO CEDAR FORESTS
O’Brien identified Mount Hermon with Kharsag primarily because the text associates it with cedar forests. So even though the Sumero-Akkadians located their world mountain in the north, northeast, or even the east of what is today Iraq, O’Brien chose to place it in the extreme west, the direction of Lebanon’s celebrated cedar forests, because, in his opinion, there were no cedar forests in the Zagros Mountains. Yet as we have seen, cedar forests existed in abundance throughout the Zagros Mountains at the start of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations. So thorough, however, was their extermination that much later scribes interpreted references to cedar forests in ancient texts as alluding to Lebanon in the far west. This was simply because the scribes were not aware that cedar forests had once existed in the mountains to the north and northeast of their kingdoms. As a consequence, some versions of the famous Epic of Gilgamesh have its hero embarking on his quest for the plant of immortality and ending up in the vicinity of Lake Van and the Armenian Highlands, while others have Gilgamesh in Lebanon, traveling as far as Mount Hermon.31
If Kharsag is to be geographically placed anywhere, then it is going to be in the direction of the Eastern Taurus Mountains and Armenian Highlands, close to Lake Van. What is more, if Kharsag really was established where the Tigris and Euphrates sprouted forth, as the Nippur foundation cylinder suggests, this locates it in the vicinity of the Bingöl massif, making it the true “place of the gods,” in both Armenian and Mesopotamian tradition. Here too was the site of the terrestrial Paradise, which O’Brien was almost certainly right to identify with Kharsag, and thus the Duku mound, where the Anunnaki lived and were first created.
Whether or not Göbekli Tepe can claim some credit as the original inspiration behind the Duku mound, as Klaus Schmidt surmises, remains to be seen. Undoubtedly, it would have had some influence on the development of the various myths featuring the Duku mound, just in the same manner that the story of the first sheep and grain created on the Duku mound and given by the Anunnaki to humankind is an abstract memory of the introduction of animal husbandry and sedentary farming in the triangle d’or. Having said this, the vision of the Duku as an abandoned tell situated in a hilly or mountainous environment, on which was built the “Ancient City,” fits Göbekli Tepe perfectly. So in summary we can say that the concept of the Duku—as handed down across the millennia, until it became a feature in the cosmological world of the Sumerians, Akkadians, and later Babylonians and Assyrians—most likely constituted an amalgam of sites that included Göbekli Tepe in the triangle d’or, and another now lost site in the vicinity of Bingöl Mountain in the Armenian Highlands.
So who exactly were the Anunnaki, and what were they doing in the terrestrial Paradise, where in biblical tradition Adam and Eve are placed after being created by God? As we see next, in Mesopotamian tradition it was not God, but the Anunnaki who were responsible for the creation of the first humans.
31
THE MAKING OF HUMANKIND
As to who the Anunnaki might have been, we shall learn soon enough, and as to what they were doing in the terrestrial Paradise, the answer is clear—Kharsag, Eden, and Dilmun, as geologist and writer Christian O’Brien suspected, are all one and the same, and in Mesopotamian tradition it was here that the Anunnaki are said to have “made” humankind.
One story in particular talks about mythical beings called the Igigi being burdened with labor by their masters, the Anunnaki, and rebelling, only to be replaced by human beings.1 The account appears in the myth of Atrahasis, the Assyrian flood hero, where we find the Igigi being told to dig a watercourse in a paradise seen in terms of a garden.2 The environment is actually very similar to the setting imagined by Christian O’Brien in his own translation of the Nippur foundation cylinder.
THE CREATION OF MAN
After “3600 years” of digging out the Tigris and Euphrates river beds to create water channels, seen as “the lifelines of the land,”3 the Igigi decide they are not going to suffer this toil any longer and so rebel against the Anunnaki, who are under the leadership of Ellil (the Old Babylonian and Assyrian form of Enlil).4 Apparently, they set fire to their tools and lay siege to Ekur, Ellil’s mountain house, where the other Anunnaki are also to be found. On learning why exactly the Igigi are up in arms, the Anunnaki council decides to make the first humans in order to carry out all further manual work on behalf of the gods.
The humans are created by the Anunnaki through the intervention of “far-sighted Enki” and some of the other Anunnaki.5 To achieve this, the god Illawela “who had intelligence” (the god Kingu in other accounts) is sacrificed, and the Anunnaki immerse themselves in his blood to pu
rify themselves.6 Enki then provides clay to the womb goddess Nintu, also called Mami, who calls upon more womb goddesses to start molding together the blood of the god to create the first human beings “to bear the yoke . . . to bear the load of the gods.” From the god’s flesh a ghost comes into existence, so that the slain god might never be forgotten.7
In another version of the Mesopotamian creation myth, the first man is said to have been Adapa, a name reminiscent of Adam, the first man of Hebrew myth, who is modeled from clay that is the color of blood.8 In this instance it is not only Enki who provides clay for the creation of the first humans, but also his wife Ninkharsag, who is synonymous with Nintu and Mami. Together they mold together the blood and clay to create the likeness of the human form.
Ninkharsag, we must remember, is one and the same as the wise snake goddess Šir, or Muš, of the Nippur foundation cylinder, meaning that in Mesopotamian myth a goddess identified as a snake is involved in the creation of the first human beings. George A. Barton, the original translator of the Nippur foundation cylinder, sensed the biblical connection with this story when he wrote: “She [Muš] was very wise. Her counsels strengthen the wise divinity of Anu [the god of heaven], a statement which reveals a point of view similar to that of Genesis 3,”9 a reference, very clearly, to Eve’s role as the progenitor of humankind in the Genesis story.
EVE, THE GIVER OF LIFE
Strangely, in Aramaic, the West Semitic language used in the Bible lands during the first millennium BC, the word for Eve (, chava or hava) is more or less identical to the word for snake ().10 In Arabic also the name Eve, hawwa, means “snake,” although it can also mean “giver of life.” Life, Eve, and the Serpent of Temptation are ultimately bound together, reflections of each other, and if this is the case then the fact that Eve bears correspondences with the goddess Ninkharsag, Muš, or Šir, the wife of Enki, is significant. Could Eve simply be a Hebrew form of this snake goddess who was responsible for the creation of humanity, the same way that in biblical tradition Eve is considered to be the First Mother of humankind?
If so, then it strengthens still further the case for the Mush Plain being the Garden of Eden and Bingöl Mountain being not only Kharsag, and the Duku mound, where the Anunnaki lived and were created, but also the true “place of the gods” in Armenian tradition. Perhaps as both Klaus Schmidt and the current author surmise, the Anunnaki are to be seen as the instigators of the Neolithic revolution, whose memory is immortalized in the T-shaped pillars found in the various large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe. As we have seen, there is every chance that these divine ancestors are a memory of Swiderian groups who entered eastern Anatolia sometime during the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900–9600 BC, and went on to catalyze the Neolithic revolution in the triangle d’or.
Yet there remains a stratum of activity concerned with this transformation of humanity from simple hunter and forager to animal herder and agricultural laborer that needs addressing, and this is the memory of the founders of civilization contained in the forgotten, fringe, and often heretical literature of the Judaic world. Here the mythical beings that provide humanity with the rudiments of civilization are named as ‘îrîn, “Watchers.” As we see next, their story is told in the book of Enoch, one of the strangest yet most compelling holy books ever written.
32
THE COMING OF THE WATCHERS
While researching the myths and legends of Bingöl Mountain I became intrigued by its ancient name of Srmantz, or Srmanç, which appears occasionally in old Armenian texts without explanation.1 In Greek, I found it written Σερμάντου (Sermantou),2 which I asked writer and journalist Jonathan Bright, a colleague from Greece, to investigate on my behalf. He possesses a sound understanding of the origins of the Greek language and stood a good chance of identifying the root components behind this curious place-name. Without knowing anything about my findings concerning Bingöl Mountain, he felt compelled to respond in the following manner:
I cannot avoid noticing the resemblance of the word [Σερμάντου (Sermantou)] with the Enochian ‘Eρμώμ’ (Sherman-tu/Shermon-/Hermon-/Hermom. . .), where the 200 watchers have supposedly descended, so although Mt Hermon is identified as the one standing at the borders between Syria, Lebanon and Israel (Golan Heights), one cannot help but wonder . . .3
One cannot help but wonder, indeed. Mount Hermon does indeed feature in “Enochian” texts, such as the enigmatic book of Enoch. This is a pseudepigraphical (falsely attributed) work of immense age, the oldest fragments of which have been identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which in their earliest form date to the third century BC.
One of the book of Enoch’s internal texts, known to scholars as the book of the Watchers, tells the story of the ‘îrîn, a name given to angels in certain Hebrew works of early manufacture and meaning something like “those who are awake” or “those who watch” (in Greek, γρήγοροι [egrêgoroi]; in Latin and Slavic, Grigori; and in English, Watchers).*18 It is said that two hundred of their number came together in an assembly on top of a mountain and swore an oath of loyalty before descending to the plains below. Here they took mortal wives and revealed to them the secret arts of heaven. For this they became outcasts, rebels, and reprobates—the first fallen angels, a crime for which they were rounded up, incarcerated by the heavenly angels, and forced to watch the slaughter of their giant offspring, the Nephilim, a word that means “those who have fallen” or the “fallen ones.”
FIRSTS FOR HUMANITY
The secret arts and sciences of heaven revealed to humanity by the rebel Watchers, as I first noted in From the Ashes of Angels, correspond with a number of firsts for humanity in the centuries and millennia after the initial Neolithic revolution. This we can see beginning with the construction of Göbekli Tepe in the mid-tenth millennium BC and continuing in one form or another across the Near East and Middle East for the next four thousand years.
In addition to the earliest expression of animal domestication and agriculture, the earliest use of beaten and smelted metal took place in the Near East, as did the earliest manufacture of linen fabric, the first brewing of beer and fermenting of wine. Some of the earliest creation of figurines using fired pottery occurred in this region, as did the first known construction of stone buildings for both secular and religious purposes.
This very same epoch saw the first use of stone drills, arguably made of flint, to penetrate large, polished beads made from semiprecious stone, such as quartz, agate, and carnelian, to create beautiful necklaces. At the same time, we find the first use of green malachite powder for cosmetic purposes. Interestingly, the Watchers were accused of teaching women how to beautify themselves, just as they are said to have introduced humanity to working with metal,4 something that took place for the first time at Çayönü in southeast Anatolia.
THE SONS OF GOD
So who were the Watchers, and how do they fit into the bigger picture? Bible scholars are convinced that the book of Enoch and other similar examples of Enochian literature derive from a few brief passages in Genesis 6, which speak of how the bene ha-Elohim, the “Sons of God,” who are synonymous with the Watchers, came upon the “daughters of men” and, finding them fair, lay with them to produce gibborim, “giants,” generally interpreted as alluding to the Nephilim. However, this is the original account:
The fallen ones [Nephilim] were in the earth in those days, and even afterwards when sons of God [bene ha-Elohim] come in unto daughters of men, and they have borne to them—they [are] the heroes, who, from of old, [are] the men of name [gibborim]. (Gen. 6:4).
Clearly, the Nephilim were actually already existent when the Sons of God, that is, the Watchers, took mortal wives, and there is good reason to suggest that the Watchers and Nephilim are simply different names for the same antediluvian population that thrived in the Bible lands prior to the Flood of Noah. Yet to think that these meager lines should have inspired the story of the Watchers in the book of Enoch seems unlikely. More plausible is that it was
the other way around: the few lines in the book of Genesis are interpolations, later insertions, based on quite separate source material, most likely some variation of the Watchers story.
After reading the book of Enoch, I became convinced that these Watchers, or “fallen ones,” like the Anunnaki of Sumero-Akkadian tradition, were very powerful human individuals who lived during some distant age of humankind. They were advanced enough to give us the rudiments of civilization, recalled in the manner in which the fallen angels revealed to mortal kind the forbidden arts and sciences of heaven. What is more, their sexual liaisons with the “daughters of men” expressed their quite obvious human nature, as well as their ability to cocreate in order to produce flesh and blood offspring that resembled both themselves and their mortal wives.
VISAGE LIKE A VIPER
Yet these rebel Watchers, or fallen angels, bore no recognizable wings. In Enochian literature they are described only as tall in stature, with long, white hair, pale skin, ruddy complexions, and mesmeric eyes that quite literally shine like the sun.5 One crucial passage in a fragmentary text known as the Testament of Amram likens the visage of one Watcher to that of a “viper,” suggesting a long, narrow face of apparent serpentine appearance.6
At other times, the Nephilim, as the offspring of the Watchers, are called Awwim, “Serpents,”7 while in one instance a Nephilim is described as the “son of the serpent named Tabâ’et,”8 with Tabâ’et being one of the rebel Watchers. A Watcher named Gâdreêl is even cited as the serpent that “led astray Eve,”9 implying that the serpent of Eden was in fact a Watcher, or fallen angel. More crucially these strange beings are occasionally described as flying like birds,10 or they are described as wearing iridescent dark cloaks,11 or garments with “the appearance of feathers”12 (see figure 32.1). Very clearly it suggests the Watchers are in fact quite human shamans, or some kind of ruling elite, and not simply heavenly beings that have become flesh and blood in order to lie with mortal women.
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