The 12th Planet

by Zecharia Sitchin

  The similarity of the biblical and Sumerian descriptions, both of the vehicles and the beings within them, is obvious. The description of the vehicles as "bird," "wind bird," and "whirlwind" that could rise heavenward while emitting a brilliance, leaves no doubt that they were some kind of flying machine.

  Enigmatic murals uncovered at Tell Ghassul, a site east of the Dead Sea whose ancient name is unknown, may shed light on our subject. Dating to circa 3500 B.C., the murals depict a large eight-pointed "compass," the head of a helmeted person within a bell-shaped chamber, and two designs of mechanical craft that could well have been the "whirlwinds" of antiquity. (Fig. 66)

  Fig. 66

  The ancient texts also describe some vehicle used to lift aeronauts into the skies. Gudea stated that, as the "divine bird" rose to circle the lands, it "flashed upon the raised bricks." The protected enclosure was described as MU.NA.DA.TUR.TUR ("strong stone resting place of the MU"). Urukagina, who ruled in Lagash, said in regard to the "divine black wind bird": "The MU that lights up as a fire I made high and strong." Similarly, Lu-Utu, who ruled in Umma in the third millennium B.C., constructed a place for a mu, "which in a fire comes forth," for the god Utu, "in the appointed place within his temple."

  The Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, recording his rebuilding of Marduk's sacred precinct, said that within fortified walls made of burned brick and gleaming onyx marble:

  I raised the head of the boat ID.GE.UL

  the Chariot of Marduk's princeliness;

  The boat ZAG.MU.KU, whose approach is observed,

  the supreme traveler between Heaven and Earth,

  in the midst of the pavilion I enclosed,

  screening off its sides.

  ID.GE.UL, the first epithet employed to describe this "supreme traveler," or "Chariot of Marduk," literally means "high to heaven, bright at night." ZAG.MU.KU, the second epithet describing the vehicle—clearly a "boat" nesting in a special pavilion—means "the bright MU which is for afar."

  That a mu—an oval-topped, conical object—was indeed installed in the inner, sacred enclosure of the temples of the Great Gods of Heaven and Earth can, fortunately, be proved. An ancient coin found at Byblos (the biblical Gebal) on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Lebanon depicts the Great Temple of Ishtar. Though shown as it stood in the first millennium B.C., the requirement that temples be built and rebuilt upon the same site and in accordance with the original plan undoubtedly means that we see the basic elements of the original temple of Byblos, traced to millennia earlier.

  The coin depicts a two-part temple. In front stands the main temple structure, imposing with its columned gateway. Behind it is. an inner courtyard, or "sacred area," hidden and protected by a high, massive wall. It is clearly a raised area, for it can be reached only by ascending many stairs. (Fig. 67)

  Fig. 67

  In the center of this sacred area stands a special platform, its crossbeam construction resembling that of the Eiffel Tower, as though built to withstand great weight. And on the platform stands the object of all this security and protection: an object that can only be a mu.

  Like most Sumerian syllabic words, mu had a primary meaning; in the case of mu, it was "that which rises straight." Its thirty-odd nuances encompassed the meanings "heights," "fire," "command," "a counted period," as well as (in later times) "that by which one is remembered." If we trace the written sign for mu from its Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform stylizations to its original Sumerian pictographs, the following pictorial evidence emerges:

  We clearly see a conical chamber, depicted by itself or with a narrow section attached to it. "From a golden chamber-in-the-sky I will watch over thee," Inanna promised to the Assyrian king. Was this mu the "heavenly chamber"?

  A hymn to Inanna/Ishtar and her journeys in the Boat of Heaven clearly indicates that the mu was the vehicle in which the gods roamed the skies far and high:

  Lady of Heaven:

  She puts on the Garment of Heaven;

  She valiantly ascends towards Heaven.

  Over all the peopled lands

  she flies in her MU.

  Lady, who in her MU

  to the heights of Heaven joyfully wings.

  Over all the resting places

  she flies in her MU.

  There is evidence to show that the people of the eastern Mediterranean had seen such a rocket-like object not only in a temple enclosure but actually in flight. Hittite glyphs, for example, showed—against a background of starry heavens—cruising missiles, rockets mounted on launch pads, and a god inside a radiating chamber. (Fig. 68)

  Fig. 68

  Professor H. Frankfort (Cylinder Seals), demonstrating how both the art of making the Mesopotamian cylinder seals and the subjects depicted on them spread throughout the ancient world, reproduces the design on a seal found in Crete and dated to the thirteenth century B.C. The seal design clearly depicts a rocket ship moving in the skies and propelled by flames escaping from its rear. (Fig. 69)

  The winged horses, the entwined animals, the winged celestial globe, and the deity with horns protruding from his headdress are all known Mesopotamian themes. It can certainly be assumed that the fiery rocket shown on the Cretan seal was also an object familiar throughout the ancient Near East.

  Fig. 69

  Fig. 70

  Indeed, a rocket with "wings" or fins—reachable by a "ladder"—can be seen on a tablet excavated at Gezer, a town in ancient Canaan, west of Jerusalem. The double imprint of the same seal also shows a rocket resting on the ground next to a palm tree. The celestial nature or destination of the objects is attested by symbols of the Sun, Moon, and zodiacal constellations that adorn the seal. (Fig. 70)

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  The Mesopotamian texts that refer to the inner enclosures of temples, or to the heavenly journeys of the gods, or even to instances where mortals ascended to the heavens, employ the Sumerian term mu or its Semitic derivatives shu-mu ("that which is a mu'?, sham, or shem. Because the term also connoted "that by which one is remembered," the word has come to be taken as meaning "name." But the universal application of "name" to early texts that spoke of an object used in flying has obscured the true meaning of the ancient records.

  Thus G. A. Barton (The Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad) established the unchallenged translation of Gudea's temple inscription—that "Its MU shall hug the lands from horizon to horizon"—as "Its name shall fill the lands." A hymn to Ishkur, extolling his "ray-emitting MU" that could attain the heights of Heaven, was likewise rendered: "Thy name is radiant, it reaches Heaven's zenith." Sensing, however, that mu or shem may mean an object and not "name," some scholars have treated the term as a suffix or grammatical phenomenon not requiring translation and have thereby avoided the issue altogether.

  It is not too difficult to trace the etymology of the term, and the route by which the "sky chamber" assumed the meaning of "name." Sculptures have been found that show a god inside a rocket-shaped chamber, as in this object of extreme antiquity (now in the possession of the University Museum, Philadelphia) where the celestial nature of the chamber is attested by the twelve globes decorating it. (Fig. 71)

  Many seals similarly depict a god (and sometimes two) within such oval "divine chambers"; in most instances, these gods within their sacred ovals were depicted as objects of veneration.

  Wishing to worship their gods throughout the lands, and not only at the official "house" of each deity, the ancient peoples developed the custom of setting up imitations of the god within his divine "sky chamber." Stone pillars shaped to simulate the oval vehicle were erected at selected sites, and the image of the god was carved into the stone to indicate that he was within the object.

  It was only a matter of time before kings and rulers—associating these pillars (called stelae) with the ability to ascend to the Heavenly Abode—began to carve their own images upon the stelae as a way of associating themselves with the Eternal Abode. If they could not escape a physical oblivion, it was important that at leas
t their "name" be forever commemorated. (Fig. 72)

  Fig. 71

  Fig. 72

  That the purpose of the commemorative stone pillars was to simulate a fiery skyship can further be gleaned from the term by which such stone stelae were known in antiquity. The Sumerians called them NA.RU ("stones that rise"). The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians called them naru ("objects that give off light"). The Amurru called them nuras ("fiery objects"—in Hebrew, ner still means a pillar that emits light, and thus today's "candle"). In the Indo-European tongues of the Hurrians and the Hittites, the stelae were called hu-u-ashi ("fire bird of stone").

  Biblical references indicate familiarity with two types of commemorative monument, a yad and a shem. The prophet Isaiah conveyed to the suffering people of Judaea the Lord's promise of a better and safer future:

  And I will give them,

  In my House and within my walls,

  A yad and a shem.

  Literally translated, this would amount to the Lord's promise to provide his people with a "hand" and a "name." Fortunately, however, from ancient monuments called yad's that still stand in the Holy Land, we learn that they were distinguished by tops shaped like pyramidions. The shem, on the other hand, was a memorial with an oval top. Both, it seems evident, began as simulations of the "sky chamber," the gods' vehicle for ascending to the Eternal Abode. In ancient Egypt, in fact, the devout made pilgrimages to a special temple at Heliopolis to view and worship the ben-ben--a pyramidion-shaped object in which the gods had arrived on Earth in times immemorial. Egyptian pharaohs, on their deaths, were subjected to a ceremony of "opening of the mouth," in which they were supposed to be transported by a similiar yad or a shem to the divine Abode of Eternal Life. (Fig. 73)

  The persistence of biblical translators to employ "name" wherever they encounter shem has ignored a farsighted study published more than a century ago by G. M. Redslob (in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft) in which he correctly pointed out that the term shem and the term shamaim ("heaven") stem from the root word shamah, meaning "that which is highward." When the Old Testament reports that King David "made a shem" to mark his victory over the Aramaeans, Redslob said, he did not "make a name" but set up a monument pointing skyward.

  The realization that mu or shem in many Mesopotamian texts should be read not as "name"' but as "sky vehicle" opens the way to the understanding of the true meaning of many ancient tales, including the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.

  Fig. 73

  The Book of Genesis, in its eleventh chapter, reports on the attempt by humans to raise up a shem. The biblical account is given in concise (and precise) language that bespeaks historical fact. Yet generations of scholars and translators have sought to impart to the tale only an allegorical meaning because—as they understood it—it was a tale concerning Mankind's desire to "make a name" for itself. Such an approach voided the tale of its factual meaning; our conclusion regarding the true meaning of shem makes the tale as meaningful as it must have been to the people of antiquity themselves.

  The biblical tale of the Tower of Babel deals with events that followed the repopulation of Earth after the Deluge, when some of the people "journeyed from the east, and they found a plain in the land of Shin'ar, and they settled there."

  The Land of Shinar is, of course, the Land of Sumer, in the plain between the two rivers in southern Mesopotamia. And the people, already knowledgeable concerning the art of brickmaking and high-rise construction for an urban civilization, said:

  "Let us build us a city,

  and a tower whose top shall reach the heavens;

  and let us make us a shem,

  lest we be scattered upon the face of the Earth."

  But this human scheme was not to God's liking.

  And the Lord came down,

  to see the city and the tower

  which the Children of Adam had erected.

  And he said: "Behold,

  all are as one people with one language,

  and this is just the beginning of their undertakings;

  Now, anything which they shall scheme to do

  shall no longer be impossible for them."

  And the Lord said—to some colleagues whom the Old Testament does not name:

  "Come, let us go down,

  and there confound their language;

  So that they may not understand each other's speech."

  And the Lord scattered them from there

  upon the face of the whole Earth,

  and they ceased to build the city.

  Therefore was its name called Babel,

  for there did the Lord mingle the Earth's tongue.

  The traditional translation of shem as "name" has kept the tale unintelligible for generations. Why did the ancient residents of Babel—Babylonia—exert themselves to "make a name," why was the "name" to be placed upon "a tower whose top shall reach the heavens," and how could the "making of a name" counteract the effects of Mankind's scattering upon Earth?

  If all that those people wanted was to make (as scholars explain) a "reputation" for themselves, why did this attempt upset the Lord so much? Why was the raising of a "name" deemed by the Deity to be a feat after which "anything which they shall scheme to do shall no longer be impossible for them"? The traditional explanations certainly are insufficient to clarify why the Lord found it necessary to call upon other unnamed deities to go down and put an end to this human attempt.

  We believe that the answers to all these questions become plausible—even obvious—once we read "skyborne vehicle" rather than "name" for the word shem, which is the term employed in the original Hebrew text of the Bible. The story would then deal with the concern of Mankind that, as the people spread upon Earth, they would lose contact with one another. So they decided to build a "skyborne vehicle" and to erect a launch tower for such a vehicle so that they, too, could—like the goddess Ishtar, for example—fly in a mu "over all the peopled lands."

  A portion of the Babylonian text known as the "Epic of Creation" relates that the first "Gateway of the Gods" was constructed in Babylon by the gods themselves. The Anunnaki, the rank-and-file gods, were ordered to

  Construct the Gateway of the Gods....

  Let its brickwork be fashioned.

  Its shem shall be in the designated place.

  For two years, the Anunnaki toiled—"applied the implement ... molded bricks"—until "they raised high the top of Eshagila" ("house of Great Gods") and "built the stage tower as high as High Heaven."

  It was thus some cheek on the part of Mankind to establish its own launch tower on a site originally used for the purpose by the gods, for the name of the place—Babili—literally meant "Gateway of the Gods."

  Is there any other evidence to corroborate the biblical tale and our interpretation of it?

  The Babylonian historian-priest Berossus, who in the third century B.C. compiled a history of Mankind, reported that the "first inhabitants of the land, glorying in their own strength ... undertook to raise a tower whose 'top' should reach the sky." But the tower was overturned by the gods and heavy winds, "and the gods introduced a diversity of tongues among men, who till that time had all spoken the same language."

  George Smith (The Chaldean Account of Genesis) found in the writings of the Greek historian Hestaeus a report that, in accordance with "olden traditions," the people who had escaped the Deluge came to Senaar in Babylonia but were driven away from there by a diversity of tongues. The historian Alexander Polyhistor (first century B.C.) wrote that all men formerly spoke the same language. Then some undertook to erect a large and lofty tower so that they might "climb up to heaven." But the chief god confounded their design by sending a whirlwind; each tribe was given a different language. "The city where it happened was Babylon."