The 12th Planet

by Zecharia Sitchin

  The sight of a starving, disintegrating Mankind, of parents eating their own children, finally brought about the unavoidable: another confrontation between Enki and Enlil. In the seventh "passing," when the remaining men and women were "like ghosts of the dead," they received a message from Enki. "Make a loud noise in the land," he said. Send out heralds to command all the people: "Do not revere your gods, do not pray to your goddesses." There was to be total disobedience!

  Under the cover of such turmoil, Enki planned more concrete action. The texts, quite fragmented at this point, disclose that he convened a secret assembly of "elders" in his temple. "They entered ... they took counsel in the House of Enki." First Enki exonerated himself, telling them how he had opposed the acts of the other gods. Then he outlined a plan of action; it somehow involved his command of the seas and the Lower World.

  We can glean the clandestine details of the plan from the fragmentary verses: "In the night ... after he ..." someone had to be "by the bank of the river" at a certain time, perhaps to await the return of Enki from the Lower World. From there Enki "brought the water warriors"—perhaps also some of the Earthlings who were Primitive Workers in the mines. At the appointed time, commands were shouted: "Go! ... the order ..."

  In spite of missing lines, we can gather what had happened from the reaction of Enlil. "He was filled with anger." He summoned the Assembly of the Gods and sent his sergeant at arms to fetch Enki. Then he stood up and accused his brother of breaking the surveillance-and-containment plans:

  All of us, Great Anunnaki,

  reached together a decision....

  I commanded that in the Bird of Heaven

  Adad should guard the upper regions;

  that Sin and Nergal should guard

  the Earth's middle regions;

  that the bolt, the bar of the sea,

  you [Enki] should guard with your rockets.

  But you let loose provisions for the people!

  Enlil accused his brother of breaking the "bolt to the sea." But Enki denied that it had happened with his consent:

  The bolt, the bar of the sea,

  I did guard with my rockets.

  [But] when ... escaped from me ...

  a myriad of fish ... it disappeared;

  they broke off the bolt ...

  they had killed the guards of the sea.

  He claimed that he had caught the culprits and punished them, but Enlil was not satisfied. He demanded that Enki "stop feeding his people," that he no longer "supply corn rations on which the people thrive." The reaction of Enki was astounding:

  The god got fed up with the sitting;

  in the Assembly of the Gods,

  laughter overcame him.

  We can imagine the pandemonium. Enlil was furious. There were heated exchanges with Enki and shouting. "There is slander in his hand!" When the Assembly was finally called to order, Enlil took the floor again. He reminded his colleagues and subordinates that it had been a unanimous decision. He reviewed the events that led to the fashioning of the Primitive Worker and recalled the many times that Enki "broke the rule."

  But, he said, there was still a chance to doom Mankind. A "killing flood" was in the offing. The approaching catastrophe had to be kept a secret from the people. He called on the Assembly to swear themselves to secrecy and, most important, to "bind prince Enki by an oath."

  Enlil opened his mouth to speak

  and addressed the Assembly of all the gods:

  "Come, all of us, and take an oath

  regarding the Killing Flood!"

  Anu swore first;

  Enlil swore; his sons swore with him.

  At first, Enki refused to take the oath. "Why will you bind me with an oath?" he asked. "Am I to raise my hands against my own humans?" But he was finally forced to take the oath. One of the texts specifically states: "Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag, the gods of Heaven and Earth, had taken the oath."

  The die was cast.

  •

  What was the oath he was bound by? As Enki chose to interpret it, he swore not to reveal the secret of the coming Deluge to the people; but could he not tell it to a wall? Calling Atra-Hasis to the temple, he made him stay behind a screen. Then Enki pretended to speak not to his devout Earthling but to the wall. "Reed screen," he said,

  Pay attention to my instructions.

  On all the habitations, over the cities,

  a storm will sweep.

  The destruction of Mankind's seed it will be....

  This is the final ruling,

  the word of the Assembly of the gods,

  the word spoken by Anu, Enlil and Ninhursag.

  (This subterfuge explains Enki's later contention, when the survival of Noah/Utnapishtim was discovered, that he had not broken his oath—that the "exceedingly wise" (atra-hasis) Earthling had found out the secret of the Deluge all by himself, by correctly interpreting the signs.) Pertinent seal depictions show an attendant holding the screen while Ea—as the Serpent God—reveals the secret to Atra-Hasis. (Fig. 160)

  Fig. 160

  Enki's advice to his faithful servant was to build a waterborne vessel; but when the latter said, "I have never built a boat ... draw for me a design on the ground that I may see," Enki provided him with precise instruction regarding the boat, its measurements, and its construction. Steeped in Bible stories, we imagine this "ark" as a very large boat, with decks and superstructures. But the biblical term—teba—stems from the root "sunken," and it must be concluded that Enki instructed his Noah to construct a submersible boat—a submarine.

  The Akkadian text quotes Enki as calling for a boat "roofed over and below," hermetically sealed with "tough pitch." There were to be no decks, no openings, "so that the sun shall not see inside," It was to be a boat "like an Apsu boat," a ulili; it is the very term used nowadays in Hebrew (oleleth) to denote a submarine.

  "Let the boat," Enki said, "be a MA.GUR.GUR"—"a boat that can turn and tumble." Indeed, only such a boat could have survived an overpowering avalanche of waters.

  The Atra-Hasis version, like the others, reiterates that although the calamity was only seven days away, the people were unaware of its approach. Atra-Hasis used the excuse that the "Apsu vessel" was being built so that he could leave for Enki's abode and perhaps thereby avert Enlil's anger. This was readily accepted, for things were really bad. Noah's father had hoped that his birth signaled the end of a long time of suffering. The people's problem was a drought—the absence of rain, the shortage of water. Who in his right mind would have thought that they were about to perish in an avalanche of water?

  Yet if the humans could not read the signs, the Nefilim could. To them, the Deluge was not a sudden event; though it was unavoidable, they detected its coming. Their scheme to destroy Mankind rested not on an active but on a passive role by the gods. They did not cause the Deluge; they simply connived to withhold from the Earthlings the fact of its coming.

  Aware, ,however, of the impending calamity, and of its global impact, the Nefilim took steps to save their own skins. With Earth about to be engulfed by water, they could go in only one direction for protection: skyward. When the storm that preceded the Deluge began to blow, the Nefilim took to their shuttlecraft, and remained in Earth orbit until the waters began to subside.

  The day of the Deluge, we will show, was the day the gods fled from Earth.

  The sign for which Utnapishtim had to watch, upon which he was to join all others in the ark and seal it, was this:

  When Shamash,

  who orders a trembling at dusk,

  will shower down a rain of eruptions

  board thou the ship,

  batten up the entrance!

  Shamash, as we know, was in charge of the spaceport at Sippar. There is no doubt in our mind that Enki instructed Utnapishtim to watch for the first sign of space launchings at Sippar. Shuruppak, where Utnapishtim lived, was only 18 beru (some 180 kilometers, or 112 miles) south of Sippar. Since the launchings were to take place at dusk
, there would be no problem in seeing the "rain of eruptions" that the rising rocket ships would "shower down."

  Though the Nefilim were prepared for the Deluge, its coming was a frightening experience: "The noise of the Deluge ... set the gods trembling." But when the moment to leave Earth arrived, the gods, "shrinking back, ascended to the heavens of Anu." The Assyrian version of Atra-Hasis speaks of the gods using rukub ilani ("chariot of the gods") to escape from Earth. "The Anunnaki lifted up," their rocket-ships, like torches, "setting the land ablaze with their glare."

  Orbiting Earth, the Nefilim saw a scene of destruction that affected them deeply. The Gilgamesh texts tell us that, as the storm grew in intensity, not only "could no one see his fellow," but "neither could the people be recognized from the heavens." Crammed into their spacecraft, the gods strained to see what was happening on the planet from which they had just blasted off.

  The gods cowered like dogs,

  crouched against the outer wall.

  Ishtar cried out like a woman in travail:

  "The olden days are alas turned to clay."...

  The Anunnaki gods weep with her.

  The gods, all humbled, sit and weep;

  their lips drawn tight ... one and all.

  The Atra-Hasis texts echo the same theme. The gods, fleeing, were watching the destruction at the same time. But the situation within their own vessels was not very encouraging, either. Apparently, they were divided among several spaceships; Tablet III of the Atra-Hasis epic describes the conditions on board one where some of the Anunnaki shared accommodations with the Mother Goddess.

  The Anunnaki, great gods,

  were sitting in thirst, in hunger....

  Ninti wept and spent her emotion;

  she wept and eased her feelings.

  The gods wept with her for the land.

  She was overcome with grief,

  she thirsted for beer.

  Where she sat, the gods sat weeping;

  crouching like sheep at a trough.

  Their lips were feverish of thirst,

  they were suffering cramp from hunger.

  The Mother Goddess herself, Ninhursag, was shocked by the utter devastation. She bewailed what she was seeing:

  The Goddess saw and she wept ...

  her lips were covered with feverishness....

  "My creatures have become like flies—

  they filled the rivers like dragonflies,

  their fatherhood was taken by the rolling sea."

  Could she, indeed, save her own life while Mankind, which she helped create, was dying? Could she really leave the Earth, she asked aloud—

  "Shall I ascend up to Heaven,

  to reside in the House of Offerings,

  where Anu, the Lord, had ordered to go?"

  The orders to the Nefilim become clear: Abandon Earth, "ascend up to Heaven." It was a time when the Twelfth Planet was nearest Earth, within the asteroid belt ("Heaven"), as evidenced. by the fact that Anu was able to attend personally the crucial conferences shortly before the Deluge.

  Enlil and Ninurta—accompanied perhaps by the elite of the Anunnaki, those who had manned Nippur—were in one spacecraft, planning, no doubt, to rejoin the main spaceship. But the other gods were not so determined. Forced to abandon Earth, they suddenly realized how attached they had become to it and its inhabitants. In one craft, Ninhursag and her group of Anunnaki debated the merits of the orders given by Anu. In another, Ishtar cried out: "The olden days, alas, are turned into clay"; the Anunnaki who were in her craft "wept with her."

  Enki was obviously in yet another spacecraft, or else he would have disclosed to the others that he had managed to save the seed of Mankind. No doubt he had other reasons to feel less gloomy, for the evidence suggests that he had also planned the encounter at Ararat.

  The ancient versions appear to imply that the ark was simply carried to the region of Ararat by the torrential waves; and a "south-storm" would indeed drive the boat northward. But the Mesopotamian texts reiterate that Atra-Hasis/Utnapishtim took along with him a "Boatman" named Puzur-Amurri ("westerner who knows the secrets"). To him the Mesopotamian Noah "handed over the structure, together with its contents," as soon as the storm started. Why was an experienced navigator needed, unless it was to bring the ark to a specific destination?

  The Nefilim, as we have shown, used the peaks of Ararat as landmarks from the very beginning. As the highest peaks in that part of the world, they could be expected to reappear first from under the mantle of water. Since Enki, "The Wise One, the All-Knowing," certainly could figure that much out, we can surmise that he had instructed his servant to guide the ark toward Ararat, planning the encounter from the very beginning.

  Berossus's version of the Flood, as reported by the Greek Abydenus, relates: "Kronos revealed to Sisithros that there would be a Deluge on the fifteenth day of Daisios [the second month], and ordered him to conceal in Sippar, the city of Shamash, every available writing. Sisithros accomplished all these things, sailed immediately to Armenia, and thereupon what the god had announced did happen."

  Berossus repeats the details regarding the release of the birds. When Sisithros (which is atra-asis reversed) was taken by the gods to their abode, he explained to the other people in the ark that they were "in Armenia" and directed them back (on foot) to Babylonia. We find in this version not only the tie-in with Sippar, the spaceport, but also confirmation that Sisithros was instructed to "sail immediately to Armenia"—to the land of Ararat.

  As soon as Atra-Hasis had landed, he slaughtered some animals and roasted them on a fire. No wonder that the exhausted and hungry gods "gathered like flies over the offering." Suddenly they realized that Man and the food he grew and the cattle he raised were essential. "When at length Enlil arrived and saw the ark, he was wroth." But the logic of the situation and Enki's persuasion prevailed; Enlil made his peace with the remnants of Mankind and took Atra-Hasis/Utnapishtim in his craft up to the Eternal Abode of the Gods.

  Another factor in the quick decision to make peace with Mankind may have been the progressive abatement of the Flood and the reemergence of dry land and the vegetation upon it. We have already concluded that the Nefilim became aware ahead of time of the approaching calamity; but it was so unique in their experience that they feared that Earth would become uninhabitable forever. As they landed on Ararat, they saw that this was not so. Earth was still habitable, and to live on it, they needed man.

  What was this catastrophe—predictable yet unavoidable? An important key to unlocking the puzzle of the Deluge is the realization that it was not a single, sudden event, but the climax of a chain of events.

  Unusual pestilences affecting man and beast and a severe drought preceded the ordeal by water—a process that lasted, according to the Mesopotamian sources, seven "passings," or sar's. These phenomena could be accounted for only by major climatic changes. Such changes have been associated in Earth's past with the recurring ice ages and interglacial stages that had dominated Earth's immediate past. Reduced precipitation, falling sea and lake levels, and the drying up of subterranean water sources have been the hallmarks of an approaching ice age. Since the Deluge that abruptly ended those conditions was followed by the Sumerian civilization and our own present, postglacial age, the glaciation in question could only have been the last one.

  Our conclusion is that the events of the Deluge relate to Earth's last ice age and its catastrophic ending.

  Drilling into the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, scientists have been able to measure the oxygen trapped in the various layers, and to judge from that the climate that prevailed millennia ago. Core samples from the bottoms of the seas, such as the Gulf of Mexico, measuring the proliferation or dwindling of marine life, likewise enable them to estimate temperatures in ages past. Based on such findings, scientists are now certain that the last ice age began some 75,000 years ago and underwent a mini-warming some 40,000 years ago. Circa 38,000 years ago, a harsher, colder, and drier period ensued. And th
en, about 13,000 years ago, the ice age abruptly ended, and our present mild climate was ushered in.