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AUTHOR'S NOTE
GENESIS
THE PRIME SOURCE for the biblical verses quoted in The Twelfth Planet is the Old Testament in its original Hebrew text. It
must be borne in mind that all the translations consulted of which the principal ones are listed at the end of the book - are just
that: translations or interpretations. In the final analysis, what counts is what the original Hebrew says.
In the final version quoted in The Twelfth Planet, I have compared the available translations against each other and against the
Hebrew source and the parallel Sumerian and Akkadian texts/tales, to come up with what I believe is the most accurate
rendering.
.
The rendering of Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hittite texts has engaged a legion of scholars for more than a century.
Decipherment of script and language was followed by transcribing, transliterating, and finally, translating. In many instances, it
was possible to choose between differing translations or interpretations only by verifying the much earlier transcriptions and
transliterations. In other instances, a late insight by a contemporary scholar could throw new light on an early translation.
The list of sources for Near Eastern texts, given at the end of this book, thus ranges from the oldest to the newest, and is
followed by the scholarly publications in which valuable contributions to the understanding of the texts were found.
THE OLD TESTAMENT has filled my life from childhood. When the seed for this book was planted, nearly fifty years ago, I was
totally unaware of the then raging Evolution versus Bible debates. But as a young schoolboy studying Genesis in its original
Hebrew, I created a confrontation of my own. We were reading one day in Chapter VI that when God resolved to destroy
Mankind by the Great Flood, "the sons of the deities", who married the daughters of men, were upon the Earth. The Hebrew
original named them Nefilim; the teacher explained it meant "giants"; but I objected: didn't it mean literally "Those Who Were
Cast Down", who had descended to Earth? I was reprimanded and told to accept the traditional interpretation.
In the ensuing years, as I have learned the languages and history and archaeology of the ancient Near East, the Nefilim became
an obsession. Archaeological finds and the deciphering of Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Canaanite and other ancient
texts and epic tales increasingly confirmed the accuracy of the biblical references to the kingdoms, cities, rulers, places,
temples, trade routes, artifacts, tools and customs of antiquity. Is it not now time, therefore, to accept the word of these same
ancient records regarding the Nefilim as visitors to Earth from the heavens?
The Old Testament repeatedly asserted: "The throne of Yahweh is in heaven" - "from heaven did the Lord behold the Earth".
The New Testament spoke of "Our Father, which art in Heaven". But the credibility of the Bible was shaken by the advent and
general acceptance of Evolution. If Man evolved, then surely he could not have been created all at once by a Deity who,
premeditating, had suggested "Let us make Adam in our image and after our likeness". All the ancient peoples believed in gods
who had descended to Earth from the heavens and who could at will soar heavenwards. But these tales were never given
credibility, having been branded by scholars from the very beginning as myths.
The writings of the ancient Near East, which include a profusion of astronomical texts, clearly speak of a planet from which
these astronauts or "gods" had come. However, when scholars, fifty and one hundred years ago, deciphered and translated the
ancient lists of celestial bodies, our astronomers were not yet aware of Pluto (which was only located in 1930). How then could
they be expected to accept the evidence of yet one more member of our solar system? But now that we too, like the ancients,
are aware of the planets beyond Saturn, why not accept that ancient evidence for the existence of the Twelfth Planet?
As we ourselves venture into space, a fresh look and an acceptance of the ancient scriptures is more than timely. Now that
astronauts have landed on the Moon, and unmanned spacecraft explore other planets, it is no longer impossible to believe that
a civilization on another planet more advanced than ours was capable of landing its astronauts on the planet Earth some time in
the past.
Indeed, a number of popular writers have speculated that ancient artifacts such as the pyramids and giant stone sculptures must
have been fashioned by advanced visitors from another planet - for surely primitive man could not have possessed by himself
the required technology? How was it, for another example, that the civilization of Sumer seemed to flower so suddenly nearly
6,000 years ago without a precursor? But since these writers usually fail to show when, how and, above all, from where such
ancient astronauts did come - their intriguing questions remain unanswered speculations.
It has taken thirty years of research, of going back to the ancient sources, of accepting them literally, to re-create in my own
mind a continuous and plausible scenario of prehistoric events. The Twelfth Planet, therefore, seeks to provide the reader with a
narrative giving answers to the specific questions of When, How, Why and Wherefrom.
The evidence I adduce consists primarily of the ancient texts and pictures themselves.
In The Twelfth Planet I have sought to decipher a sophisticated cosmogony which explains, perhaps as well as modern scientific
theories, how the solar system could have been formed, an invading planet caught into solar orbit, and Earth and other parts of
the solar system brought into being.
The evidence I offer includes celestial maps dealing with space flight to Earth from that Planet, the Twelfth. Then, in sequence,
follow the dramatic establishment of the first settlements on Earth by the Nefilim: their leaders were named; their relationships,
loves, jealousies, achievements and struggles described; the nature of their "immortality" explained.
Above all, The Twelfth Planet aims to trace the momentous events that led to the creation of Man, and the advanced methods
by which this was accomplished.
It then suggests the tangled relationship between Man and his lords, and throws fresh light on the meaning of the events in the
Garden of Eden, of the Tower of Babel, of the great Flood. Finally, Man - endowed by his makers biologically and materially- -
ends up crowding his gods off the Earth.
This book suggests that we are not alone in our solar system. Yet it may enhance rather than diminish the faith in a universal
Almighty. For, if the Nefilim created Man on Earth, they may have only been fulfilling a vaster Master Plan.
Z. SITCHIN New York, February 1977
THE ENDLESS BEGINNING
OF THE EVIDENCE that we have amassed to support our conclusions, exhibit number one is Man himself. In many ways,
modern man - Homo sapiens - is a stranger to Earth.
Ever since Charles Darwin shocked the scholars and theologians of his time with the evidence of evolution, life on Earth has
been traced through Man and the primates, mammals, and vertebrates, and backward through ever-lower life forms to the point,
billions of years ago, at which life is presumed to have begun.
But having reached these beginnings and having begun to contemplate the probabilities of life elsewhere in our solar system
and beyond, the scholars have become uneasy about life on Earth: Somehow, it does not belong here. If it began through a
series of spontaneous chemical reactions, why does life on Earth have but a single source, and not a multitude of chance
sources? And why does all living matter on Earth contain too little of the chemical elements that abound on Earth, and too much
of those that are rare on our planet?
Was life, then, imported to Earth from elsewhere?
Man's position in the evolutionary chain has compounded the puzzle. Finding a broken skull here, a jaw there, scholars at first
believed that Man originated in Asia some 500,000 years ago. But as older fossils were found, it became evident that the mills of
evolution grind much, much slower. Man's ancestor apes are now placed at a staggering 25,000,000 years ago. Discoveries in
East Africa reveal a transition to manlike apes (hominids) some 14,000,000 years ago. It was about 11,000,000 years later that
the first ape-man worthy of the classification Homo
appeared there.
The first being considered to be truly manlike - "Advanced Australopithecus" - existed in the same parts of Africa some
2,000,000 years ago. It took yet another million years to produce Homo erectus. Finally, after another 900,000 years, the first
primitive Man appeared; he is named Neanderthal after the site where his remains were first found.
In spite of the passage of more than 2,000,000 years between Advanced Australopithecus and Neanderthal, the tools of these
two groups - sharp stones - were virtually alike; and the groups themselves (as they are believed to
have looked) were hardly distinguishable.
Then, suddenly and inexplicably, some 35,000 years ago, a new race of Men - Homo sapiens ("thinking Man") - appeared as if
from nowhere, and swept Neanderthal Man from the face of Earth. These modern Men - named Cro-Magnon - looked so much
like us that, if dressed like us in modern clothes, they would be lost in the crowds of any European or American city. Because of
the magnificent cave art which they created, they were at first called "cavemen." In fact, they roamed Earth freely, for they knew
how to build shelters and homes of stones and animal skins wherever they went.
For millions of years, Man's tools had been simply stones of useful shapes. Cro-Magnon Man, however, made specialized tools
and weapons of wood and bones. He was no longer a "naked ape," for he used skins for clothing. His society was organized; he
lived in clans with a patriarchal hegemony. His cave drawings bespeak artistry and depth of feeling; his drawings and sculptures
evidence some form of "religion," apparent in the worship of a Mother Goddess, who was sometimes depicted with the sign of
the Moon's crescent. He buried his dead, and must therefore have had some philosophies regarding life, death, and perhaps
even an afterlife.
As mysterious and unexplained as the appearance of Cro-Magnon Man has been, the puzzle is still more complicated. For, as
other remains of modern Man were discovered (at sites including Swanscombe, Steinheim, and Montmaria), it became apparent
that Cro-Magnon Man stemmed from an even earlier Homo sapiens who lived in western Asia and North Africa some 2500000
years before Cro-Magnon Man.
The appearance of modem Man a mere 700,000 years after Homo erectus and some 200,000, years before Neanderthal Man is
absolutely implausible. It is also clear that Homo sapiens represents such an extreme departure from the slow evolutionary
process that many of our features, such as the ability to speak, are totally unrelated to the earlier primates.
An outstanding authority on the subject, Professor Theodosius Dobzhansky (Mankind Evolving), was especially puzzled by the
fact that this development took place during a period when Earth was going through an ice age, a most unpropitious time for
evolutionary advance. Pointing out that Homo sapiens lacks completely some of the peculiarities of the previously known types,
and has some that never appeared before, he concluded: "Modern man has many fossil collateral relatives but no progenitors;
the derivation of Homo sapiens, then, becomes a puzzle."
How, then, did the ancestors of modern Man appear some 300,000 years ago - instead of 2,000,000 or 3,000,000
years in the future, following further evolutionary development? Were we imported to Earth from elsewhere, or were we, as the
Old Testament and other ancient sources claim, created by the gods?
We now know where civilization began and how it developed, once it began. The unanswered question is: Why - why did
civilization come about at all? For, as most scholars now admit in frustration, by all data Man should still be without civilization.
There is no obvious reason that we should be any more civilized than the primitive tribes of the Amazon jungles or the
inaccessible parts of New Guinea,
But, we are told, these tribesmen still live as if in the Stone Age because they have been isolated. But isolated from what? If
they have been living on the same Earth as we, why have they not acquired the same knowledge of sciences and technologies
on their own as we supposedly have?
The real puzzle, however, is not the backwardness of the Bushmen, but our advancement; for it is now recognized that in the
normal course of evolution Man should still be typified by the Bushmen and not by us. It took Man some 2,000,000 years to
advance in his "tool industries" from the use of stones as he found them to the realization that he could chip and shape stones to
better suit his purposes. Why not another 2,000,000 years to learn the use of other materials, and another 10,000,000 years to
master mathematics and engineering and astronomy? Yet here we are, less than 50,000 years from Neanderthal Man, landing
astronauts on the Moon.
The obvious question, then, is this: Did we and our Mediterranean ancestors really acquire this advanced civilization on our
own?
Though Cro-Magnon Man did not build skyscrapers nor use metals, there is no doubt that his was a sudden and revolutionary
civilization. His mobility, ability to build shelters, his desire to clothe himself, his manufactured tools, his art - all were a sudden
high civilization breaking an endless beginning of Man's culture that stretched over millions of years and advanced at a painfully
slow pace.
Though our scholars cannot explain the appearance of Homo sapiens and the civilization of Cro-Magnon Man,
there is by now no doubt regarding this civilization's place of origin: the Near East. The uplands and mountain ranges that
extend in a semiarc from the Zagros Mountains in the east (where present-day Iran and Iraq border on each other), through the
Ararat and Taurus ranges in the north, then down, westward and southward, to the hill lands of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, are
replete with caves where the evidence of prehistoric but modern Man has been preserved.
One of these caves, Shanidar, is located in the northeastern part of the semiarc of civilization. Nowadays, fierce Kurdish
tribesmen seek shelter in the area's caves for themselves and their flocks during the cold winter months. So it was, one wintry
night 44,000 years ago, when a family of seven (one of whom was a baby) sought shelter in the cave of Shanidar.
Their remains - they were evidently crushed to death by a rockfall - were discovered in 1957 by a startled Ralph
Solecki, who went to the area in search of evidence of early Man (Professor Solecki has told me that nine skeletons were found,
of which only four were crushed by rockfall.) What he found was more than he expected. As layer upon layer of debris was
removed, it became apparent that the cave preserved a clear record of Man's habitation in the area from about 100,000 to some
13,000 years ago.
What this record showed was as surprising as the find itself. Man's culture has shown not a progression but a regression.
Starting from a certain standard, the following generations showed not more advanced but less advanced standards of civilized
life. And from about 27,000 B.C. to 11,000 B.C., the regressing and dwindling population reached the point of an almost
complete absence of habitation. For reasons that are assumed to have been climatic, Man was almost completely gone from the
whole area for some 16,000 years.
And then, circa 11,000 B.C., "thinking Man" reappeared with new vigor and on an inexplicably higher cultural level.
It was as if an unseen coach, watching the faltering human game, dispatched to the field a fresh and better-trained team to take
over from the exhausted one.
Throughout the many millions of years of his endless beginning, Man was nature's child; he subsisted by gathering the foods
that grew wild, by hunting the wild animals, by catching wild birds and fishes. But just as Man's settlements were thinning out,
just as he was abandoning his abodes, when his material and artistic achievements were disappearing - just then, suddenly,
with no apparent reason and without any prior known period of gradual preparation - Man became a farmer.
Summarizing the work of many eminent authorities on the subject, R. J. Braidwood and B. Howe (Prehistoric Investigations in
Iraqi Kurdistan) concluded that genetic studies confirm the archaeological finds and leave no doubt that agriculture began
exactly where Thinking Man had emerged earlier with his first crude civilization: in the Near East. There is no doubt by now that
agriculture spread all over the world from the Near Eastern arc of mountains and highlands.
Employing sophisticated methods of radiocarbon dating and plant genetics, many scholars from various fields of science concur
in the conclusion that Man's first farming venture was the cultivation of wheat and barley, probably through the domestication of
a wild variety of emmer. Assuming that, somehow, Man did undergo a gradual process of teaching himself how to domesticate,
grow, and farm a wild plant, the scholars remain baffled by the profusion of other plants and cereals basic to human survival and
advancement that kept coming out of the Near East. These included, in rapid succession, millet, rye, and spelt, among the
edible cereals; flax, which provided fibers and edible oil; and a variety of fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. In every instance, the
plant was undoubtedly domesticated in the Near East for millennia before it reached Europe. It was as though the Near East
were some kind of genetic-botanical laboratory, guided by an unseen hand, producing every so often a newly domesticated
plant.
The scholars who have studied the origins of the grapevine have concluded that its cultivation began in the mountains around
northern Mesopotamia and in Syria and Palestine. No wonder. The Old Testament tells us that Noah "planted a vineyard" (and
even got drunk on its wine) after his ark rested on Mount Ararat as the waters of the Deluge receded. The Bible, like the
scholars, thus places the start of vine cultivation in the mountains of northern Mesopotamia.
Apples, pears, olives, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts - all originated in the Near East and spread from there to Europe and
other parts of the world. Indeed, we cannot help recalling that the Old Testament preceded our scholars by several millennia in
identifying the very same area as the world's first orchard: "And the Lord God planted an orchard in Eden, in the east. . . . And
the Lord God caused; to grow, out of the ground, every tree that is pleasant to behold and that is good for eating."
The general location of "Eden" was certainly known to the biblical generations. It was "in the east" - east of the Land of Israel. It
was in a land watered by four major rivers, two of which are the Tigris and the Euphrates.
There can be no doubt that the Book of Genesis located the first orchard in the highlands where these rivers originated, in
northeastern Mesopotamia. Bible and science are in full agreement.
As a matter of fact, if we read the original Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis not as a theological but as a scientific text, we find
that it also accurately describes the process of plant domestication. Science tells us that the process went from wild grasses to
wild cereals to cultivated cereals, followed by fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. This is exactly the process detailed in the first
chapter of the Book of Genesis.
And the Lord said:
"Let the Earth bring forth grasses;
cereals that by seeds produce seeds;
fruit trees that bear fruit by species,
which contain the seed within themselves."
And it was so:
The Earth brought forth grass;
cereals that by seed produce seed, by species;
and trees that bear fruit, which contain
the seed within themselves, by species.
The Book of Genesis goes on to tell us that Man, expelled from the orchard of Eden, had to toil hard to grow his food. "By the
sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," the Lord said to Adam. It was after that that "Abel was a keeper of herds and Cain was
a tiller of the soil." Man, the Bible tells us, became a shepherd soon after he became a farmer.
Scholars are in full agreement with this biblical sequence of events. Analyzing the various theories regarding animal
domestication, F. E. Zeuner (Domestication of Animals) stresses that Man could not have "acquired the habit of keeping animals
in captivity or domestication before he reached the stage of living in social units of some size." Such settled communities, a
prerequisite for animal domestication, followed the changeover to agriculture.
The first animal to be domesticated was the dog, and not necessarily as Man's best friend but probably also for
food. This, it is believed, took place circa 9500 B.C. The first skeletal remains of dogs have been found in Iran, Iraq, and Israel.
Sheep were domesticated at about the same time; the Shanidar cave contains remains of sheep from circa 9000 B.C., showing
that a large part of each year's young were killed for food and skins. Goats, which also provided milk, soon followed; and pigs,
horned cattle, and hornless cattle were next to be domesticated.
In every instance, the domestication began in the Near East.
The abrupt change in the course of human events that occurred circa 11,000 B.C. in the Near East (and some 2,000 years later
in Europe) has led scholars to describe that time as the clear end of the Old Stone Age (the Paleolithic) and the beginning of a
new cultural era, the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic).
The name is appropriate ,only if one considers Man's principal raw material - which continued to be stone. His dwellings in the
mountainous areas were still built of stone; his communities were protected by stone walls; his first agricultural implement - the
sickle - was made of stone. He honored or protected his dead by covering and adorning their graves with stones; and he used
stone to make images of the supreme beings, or "gods," whose benign intervention he sought. One such image, found in
northern Israel and dated to the ninth millennium B.C., shows the carved head of a "god" shielded by a striped helmet and
wearing some kind of "goggles."
From an overall point of view, however, it would be more appropriate to call the age that began circa 11,000 B.C. not the Middle
Stone Age but the Age of Domestication.- Within the span of a mere 3,600 years - overnight in terms of the endless beginning -
Man became a fanner, and wild plants and animals were domesticated. Then, a new age clearly followed. Our scholars call it
the New Stone Age (Neolithic); but the term is totally inadequate, for the main change that had taken place circa 7500 B.C. was
the appearance of pottery.
For reasons that still elude our scholars - -but which will become clear as we unfold our tale of prehistoric events - Man's march
toward civilization was confined, for the first several millennia after 11,000 B.C., to the highlands of the Near East. The discovery
of the many uses to which clay could be put was contemporary with Man's descent from his mountain abodes toward the lower,
mud-filled valleys.
By the seventh millennium B.C., the Near Eastern arc of civilization was teeming with clay or pottery cultures, which produced
great numbers of utensils, ornaments, and statuettes. By 5000 B.C., the Near East was producing clay and pottery objects of
superb quality and fantastic design.
But once again progress slowed, and by 4500 B.C., archaeological evidence indicates, regression was all around. Pottery
became simpler. Stone utensils - a relic of the Stone Age - again became predominant. Inhabited sites reveal fewer remains.
Some sites that had been centers of pottery and clay industries began to be abandoned, and distinct clay manufacturing
disappeared. "There was a general impoverishment of culture," according to James Melaart (Earliest Civilizations of the Near
East); some sites clearly bear the marks of "the new poverty-stricken phase."
Man and his culture were clearly on the decline.
Then - suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably - the Near East witnessed the blossoming of the greatest civilization imaginable, a
civilization in which our own is firmly rooted.
A mysterious hand once more picked Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of culture, knowledge, and
civilization.
THE SUDDEN CIVILIZATION
FOR A LONG TIME, Western man believed that his civilization was the gift of Rome and Greece. But the Greek philosophers
themselves wrote repeatedly that they had drawn on even earlier sources. Later on, travelers returning to Europe reported the
existence in Egypt of imposing pyramids and temple-cities half-buried in the sands, guarded by strange stone beasts called
sphinxes.
When Napoleon arrived in Egypt in 1799, he took with him scholars to study and explain these ancient monuments. One of his
officers found near Rosetta a stone slab on which was carved a proclamation from 196 B.C. written in the ancient Egyptian
pictographic writing (hieroglyphic) as well as in two other scripts.
The decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and language, and the archaeological efforts that followed, revealed to Western
man that a high civilization had existed in Egypt well before the advent of the Greek civilization. Egyptian records spoke of royal
dynasties that began circa 3100 B.C. - two full millennia before the beginning of Hellenic civilization. Reaching its maturity in the
fifth and fourth centuries B.C., Greece was a latecomer rather than an originator.
Was the origin of our civilization, then, in Egypt? As logical as that conclusion would have seemed, the facts militated against it.
Greek scholars did describe visits to Egypt, but the ancient sources of knowledge of which they spoke were found elsewhere.
The pre-Hellenic cultures of the Aegean Sea - the Minoan on the island of Crete and the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland -
revealed evidence that the Near Eastern, not the Egyptian, culture had been adopted. Syria and Anatolia, not Egypt, were the
principal avenues through which an earlier civilization became available to the Greeks.
Noting that the Dorian invasion of Greece and the Israelite invasion of Canaan following the Exodus from Egypt took place at
about the same time (circa the thirteenth century B.C.), scholars have been fascinated to discover a growing number of
similarities between the Semitic and Hellenic civilizations. Professor Cyrus H. Gordon (Forgotten Scripts; Evidence for the
Minoan Language) opened up a new field of study by showing that an early Minoan script, called Linear A, represented a
Semitic language. He concluded that "the pattern (as distinct from the content) of the Hebrew and Minoan civilizations is the
same to a remarkable extent," and pointed out that the island's name, Crete, spelled in Minoan Ke-re-ta, was the same as the
Hebrew word Ke-re-et ("walled city") and had a counterpart in a Semitic tale of a king of Keret.
Even the Hellenic alphabet, from which the Latin and our own alphabets derive, came from the Near East. The ancient Greek
historians themselves wrote that a Phoenician named Kadmus ("ancient") brought them the alphabet, comprising the same
number of letters, in the same order, as in Hebrew; it was the only Greek alphabet when the Trojan War took place. The number
of letters was raised to twenty-six by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century B.C.
That Greek and Latin writing, and thus the whole foundation of our Western culture, were adopted from the Near East can easily
be demonstrated by comparing the order, names, signs, and even numerical values of the original Near Eastern alphabet with
the much later ancient Greek and the more recent Latin.
The scholars were aware, of course, of Greek contacts with the Near East in the first millennium B.C., culminating with the~
defeat of the Persians by Alexander the Macedonian in 331 B.C. Greek records contained much information about these
Persians and their lands (which roughly paralleled today's Iran). Judging by the names of their kings - Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes -
and the names of their deities, which appear to belong to the Indo-European linguistic stem, scholars reached the conclusion
that they were part of the Aryan ("lordly") people that appeared from somewhere near the Caspian Sea toward the end of the
second millennium B.C. and spread westward to Asia Minor, eastward to India, and southward to what the Old Testament called
the "lands of the Medes and Parsees."
Yet all was not that simple. In spite of the assumed foreign origin of these invaders, the Old Testament treated them as
part and parcel of biblical events. Cyrus, for example, was considered to be an "Anointed of Yahweh" - quite an unusual
relationship between the Hebrew God and a non-Hebrew. According to the biblical Book of Ezra, Cyrus acknowledged
his mission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and stated that he was acting upon orders given by Yahweh, whom he
called "God of Heaven." Cyrus and the other kings of his dynasty called themselves Achaemenids - after the title adopted by the
founder of the dynasty, which was Hacham-Anish. It was not an Aryan but a perfect Semitic title, which meant "wise man." By
and large, scholars have neglected to investigate the many leads that may point to similarities between the Hebrew God
Yahweh and the deity Achaemenids called "Wise Lord," whom they depicted as hovering in the skies within a Winged Globe, as
shown on the royal seal of Darius.
It has been established by now that the cultural, religious, and historic roots of these Old Persians go back to the earlier empires
of Babylon and Assyria, whose extent and fall is recorded in the Old Testament. The symbols that make up the script that
appeared on the Achaemenid monuments and seals were at first considered to be decorative designs. Engelbert Kampfer, who
visited Persepolis, the Old Persian capital, in 1686, described the signs as "cuneates," or wedge-shaped impressions. The script
has since been known as cuneiform.
As efforts began to decipher the Achaemenid inscriptions, it became clear that they were written in the same script as
inscriptions found on ancient artifacts and tablets in Mesopotamia, the plains and highlands that lay between the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers. Intrigued by the scattered finds, Paul Emile Botta set out in 1843 to conduct the first major purposeful
excavation. He selected a site in northern Mesopotamia, near present-day Mosul, now called Khorsabad. Botta was soon able to
establish that the cuneiform inscriptions named the place Dur Sharru Kin. They were Semitic inscriptions, in a sister language of
Hebrew, and the name meant "walled city of the righteous king." Our textbooks call this king Sargon II.
This capital of the Assyrian king had as its center a magnificent royal palace whose walls were lined with sculptured bas-reliefs,
which, if placed end to end, would1 stretch for over a mile. Commanding the city and the royal compound was a step pyramid
called a ziggurat; it served as a "stairway to Heaven" for the gods.
The layout of the city and the sculptures depicted a way of life on a grand scale. The palaces, temples, houses, stables,
warehouses, walls, gates, columns, decorations, statues, artworks, towers, ramparts, terraces, gardens - all were completed in
just five years. According to Georges Contenau (La Vie Quotidienne a Babylone et en Assyrie), "the imagination reels before the
potential strength of an empire which could accomplish so much in such a short space of time," some 3,000 years ago.
Not to be outdone by the French, the English appeared on the scene in the person of Sir Austen Henry Layard, who selected as
his site a place some ten miles down the Tigris River from Khorsabad. The natives called it Kuyunjik; it turned out to be the
Assyrian capital of Nineveh.
Biblical names and events had begun to come to life. Nineveh was the royal capital of Assyria under its last three great rulers:
Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurhanipal. "Now, in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, did Sennacherib king of Assyria
come up against all the walled cities of Judah," relates the Old Testament (II Kings 18:13), and when the Angel of the Lord
smote his army, "Sennacherib departed and went back, and dwelt in Nineveh."
The mounds where Nineveh was built by Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal revealed palaces, temples, and works of art that
surpassed those of Sargon. The area where the remains of Esarhaddon's palaces are believed to lie cannot be excavated, for it
is now the site of a Muslim mosque erected over the purported burial place of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a
whale when he refused ID bring Yahweh's message to Nineveh.
Layard had read in ancient Greek records that an officer in Alexander's army saw a "place of pyramids and remains of an
ancient city" - a city that was already buried in Alexander's time! Layard dug it up, too, and it turned out to be Nimrud, Assyria's
military center. It was there that Shalmaneser II set up an obelisk to record his military expeditions and conquests. Now on
exhibit at the British Museum, the obelisk lists, among the kings who were made to pay tribute, "Jehu, son of Omri, king of
Israel,"
Again, the Mesopotamian inscriptions and biblical texts supported each other!
Astounded by increasingly frequent corroboration of the biblical narratives by archaeological finds, the Assyriologists, as these
scholars came to be called, turned to the tenth chapter of the Book of Genesis. There Nimrod - "a mighty hunter by the grace of
Yahweh" - was des6ribed as the founder of all the kingdoms of Mesopotamia.
And the beginning of his kingdom:
Babel and Erech and Akkad, all in the Land of Shin'ar.
Out of that Land there emanated Ashur where
Nineveh was built, a city of wide streets; and Khalah, and Ressen - the great city

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