There Were Giants Upon the Earth

by Zechariah Sitchin

  The logical conclusion—that both the compilers of Genesis and then Berossus had access to the same or similar source material, which each used selectively—has been borne out by archaeology. But in such a conclusion, both similarities and differences take us back to our starting point, the enigmatic verses in Genesis 6: Who were the Nefilim, who were the sons of the gods—and who, indeed, was Noah?

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  THE SHIP OF NOAH

  In the Sumerian text, the ship of Ziusudra was termed Ma.gur.gur = a 'ship that can tumble and turn'. In the Akkaddian texts it was referred to as a Tebitu, with a hard 'T', meaning a submersible ship; the biblical redactor rendered it with a soft 'T a Teba—a 'Box' (hence the 'ark' in translations). In all versions, it was hermetically sealed with bitumen but had one openable aperture.

  According to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ship which Utnapishtim, the name of the hero of the Deluge in Akkadian, was instructed to build was 300 cubits (about 525 feet) long, 120 cubits (about 210 feet) wide at the top, and had a "bulwark" (height) of 120 cubits divided by 6 decks into 7 levels, "one-third of her above the water line."

  Genesis 6:15 also reports a length of 300 cubits, but only 50 cubits (about 88 feet) of width, and only 30 cubits (about 53 ft.) height, with only 3 stories (the roofed upper one included).

  At the beginning of the 20th century, biblical scholars drew comparisons with the largest-ever passenger ships then known to them:

  The Great Eastern, built in 1858, was 680 ft. long, 83 ft. wide, 48 ft. deep;

  The City of Rome, built in 1881, measured 560, 52, and 37 ft., respectively;

  The famed Lusitania, 1907, measured 762, 88, and 57 ft., respectively;

  ^ Her sister ship, The Mauretania, was the first to have 8 decks.

  Those modern proportions of length/width/height seem to agree

  more with the biblical description: Noah's Ark was as long as The City of Rome, as wide as The Great Eastern, and as high as The Lusitania.

  In his 1927 study "The Ship of the Babylonian Noah" the Assyriologist Paul Haupt suggested the design shown on page 35, based on the various ancient texts.

  III

  In Search of Noah

  The deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was decisively facilitated by the chance discovery, during Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1799, of the Rosetta Stone—a stone tablet from 196 B.C. (now on display in the British Museum, Fig. 14) on which a royal Ptolemaic

  Figure 14

  proclamation was inscribed in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, a later Egyptian cursive script called Demotic, and Greek. It was the Greek part that served as a key to unlocking the secrets of ancient Egypt's language and writing.

  No 'Rosetta Stone', a single decisive master discovery of a tablet, had occurred in the ancient Near East; there, the process of discovery was long and tedious. But there too, other forms of multilingual inscriptions moved decipherment along; above all, progress was made when it was realized that the Bible—the Hebrew Bible—was a key for unlocking those enigmatic writings. By the time decipherment was attained, not only several languages but several ancient empires—one of them most astounding—came to light.

  Fascinated by the tales (magnified as centuries passed) of Alexander the Great and his conquests, European travelers ventured to faraway Persepolis (Greek for 'City of the Persians'), where remains of palaces, gateways, processional stairways, and other monuments were still standing (Fig. 15). Visible engraved lines (that turned out to be inscriptions) were assumed at first to be some form of decorative design. A 1686 visitor (Engelbert Kampfer) to the ruins of this Persian royal site described the marking as "cuneates" ('Wedge-Shaped'—Fig. 16); the designation, 'Cuneiform' has stuck ever since to what has in time been recognized as a lingual script.

  Cuneiform script variations on some monuments gave rise to the idea that, as had been the case in Egypt, royal Persian proclamations in an empire that encompassed many diverse peoples could also be multilingual. Disparate reports by travelers increasingly focused attention on some of the multilingual Persian inscriptions; the most important and complex of them was discovered at a site in what is now northern Iran. It was in 1835 that traveling in remote Near Eastern areas that were once dominated by Persian kings, the Briton Henry Rawlinson came across a carving upon forbidding rocks at a place called Behistun. The name meant 'Place of gods', and the huge carving commemorating a royal victory was dominated by a god hovering within the ubiquitous Winged Disc (Fig. 17). The depiction was accompanied by long

  Figure 15

  inscriptions that (once deciphered by Rawlinson and others) turned out to be a trilingual record by the Persian king Darius I, a predecessor, by a century and a half, of Darius III who fought Alexander.

  Figure 16

  Figure 17

  In time it was realized that one of the Behistun languages, dubbed Old Persian, resembled Sanskrit, the 'Indo-European' mother language; it was a finding that opened the way to the decipherment of Old Persian. Taking it from there, the identity and meaning of the other two languages followed. One was later identified as Elamite, whose use in antiquity was limited to the southern parts of what is now Iran. The third matched the writings found in Babylonia; classified as 'Semitic', it belonged to a group that also included Assyrian and Canaanite whose mother tongue is called 'Akkadian'. What was common to all three Behistun languages was the use of the same cuneiform script, in which each sign expresses a whole syllable and not just a single letter. Here, in one monument, was an example of the Confusion of Languages . . .

  Hebrew, the language of the Bible, belonged to the group of 'Semitic' languages that stemmed from 'Akkadian'. The fact that Hebrew, uniquely, has remained a spoken, read, and written language throughout the ages was the unlocking key there—so much so that early scholarly studies of Babylonian and Assyrian (two 'Akkadian' languages) provided word lists that gave their similar Hebrew meanings, and compared cuneiform sign lists to their equivalents in traditional Hebrew script (Fig. 18—from Assyrian Grammar by the Rev. A. H. Sayce, 1875).

  Word of intriguing ruins in the great plain between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers (hence Mesopotamia, 'Land Between the Rivers') has been brought back to Europe by varied 17th- and 18th-century travelers. Then, suggestions that such ruins represented Babylon and Nineveh of biblical fame (and wrath) stirred up a more active interest. The realization that 19th century A.D. people were able to read inscriptions of people from a time before Greece and Persia, inscriptions from the time of the Bible, shifted interest geographically to the Lands of the Bible and chronologically to much earlier centuries.

  In some of those ruins, inscriptions in cuneiform script were found on flat tablets—tablets that were man-made of hardened clay, mostly but not always square or oblong in shape, into which the wedgelike signs

  were incised when the clay was still wet and soft (Fig. 19). Curious what they represented and what they said, European consuls stationed in various parts of the Ottoman empire pioneered what can be considered modern Near Eastern archaeology; its beginning—excavating ancient Babylon—took place south of Baghdad in Iraq in 1811. (In a twist of fate, clay tablets discovered in the ruins of Babylon included several whose cuneiform inscriptions recorded payments in silver coins by Alexander for work done in clearing debris from the Esagil temple.)

  In 1843 Paul Emile Botta, the French Consul in Mosul, a town now in Kurdish northern Iraq in what was then Ottoman-ruled Mesopotamia, set out to excavate an ancient source of such clay tablets at a Tell (ancient mound) near Mosul. The site was named Kuyunjik after the nearby village; an adjoining Tell was called Nebi Yunus ('Prophet Jonah') by the local Arabs. Botta abandoned the site after his initial probes there were

  Figure 19

  unproductive. Not to be outdone by the French, the Englishman A. Henry Layard took over the site three years later. The two mounds, where Layard was more successful
than Botta, proved to be the ancient Assyrian capital Nineveh that is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible, and that was Jonah's destination according to the Bible's tale of Jonah and the Whale.

  Botta found success farther north, at a site called Khorsabad, where he uncovered the capital of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721-705 B.C.) and his successor, King Sennacherib (705-681 B.C.); Layard gained fame as the discoverer of both Nineveh and, at another site called locally Nimrud, of the Assyrian royal city Kalhu (named Calah in the Bible). Not counting Babylon, the finds by both provided, for the first time, physical evidence corroborating the Bible (Genesis, chapter 10) about the hero Nimrod and Assyria and its major cities:

  He was first to be a hero in the Land;

  And the beginning of his kingdom:

  Babel and Erech and Akkad,

  all in the Land of Shine'ar.

  Out of that Land there emanated Ashur,

  where Nineveh was built—a city of wide streets,

  and Calah, and Ressen—the great city

  which is between Nineveh and Calah.

  At Khorsabad the excavators uncovered, among the lavish wall reliefs glorifying Sennacherib and his conquests, panels depicting his siege of the fortified city of Lachish in Judea (in 701 B.C.). The Bible (2 Kings and in Isaiah) mentions that siege (in which Sennacherib prevailed) as well as his failed siege of Jerusalem. Layard's finds included a stone column of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III (858-824 B.C.) that described, in text and carved drawing, his capture of King Jehu of Israel (Fig. 20)—an event reported in the Bible (2 Kings, 2 Chronicles).

  Wherever finds were made, it seemed, it was like digging up the veracity of the Bible.

  (By another twist of fate, Layard's sites Nimrud and Nineveh were on opposite sides of the river bend where Alexander had crossed the

  Figure 20

  Tigris River and delivered the final blow to the Persian army.)

  By the end of the 19th century, as the rumblings of the conflagration known as World War I became more ominous, the Germans joined the archaeological race (with its mapmaking, spying, and influence-peddling ramifications). Outflanking the French and the British, they took control of sites farther south, uncovering at Babylon (under the leadership of Robert Koldewey) most of the sacred precinct, the Esagil temple-ziggurat, and the grand Processional Way * with its varied gates including that of Ishtar (see Fig. 5). Farther north Walter Andrae unearthed the olden Assyrian capital Ashur—named ' the same as the land Assyria itself and its national god Ashur. (Ressen, which was also mentioned in Genesis and whose name meant 'Horse's Bridle', turned out to have been an Assyrian horse-raising site.)

  The Assyrian discoveries offered not just corroboration of the Bible's historical veracity; the art and iconography also seemed to bear out other biblical aspects. Wall reliefs in Khorsabad and Nimrud depicted winged 'angels' (Fig. 21) akin to the divine attendants described in the vision of the Prophet Isaiah (6:2), or that of the Prophet Ezekiel's vision (1:5-8, where each had four wings but also four faces, one of which was an eagle's).

  Figure 21

  The discovered sculptures and wall depictions seemed to also support some of the statements attributed to Berossus regarding what one would describe today as 'bio-engineering gone awry'—of men with wings, bulls with human heads, and so on (as earlier quoted). In Nineveh and Nimrud, the entrances to the royal palaces were flanked by colossal stone sculptures of human-headed bulls and lions (Fig. 22); and on wall ^reliefs, there were images of divine beings dressed as fish (Fig. 23)—the very image of Oannes, exactly the way Berossus had described him.

  Although it had been, when Berossus was writing, almost four centuries since Ashur, Nineveh, and other Assyrian centers had been captured and destroyed, and some three centuries since the same fate befell Babylon, their ruins were still visible without excavation—with the sculptures and wall reliefs for all to see, illustrating what Berossus was talking about. The ancient monuments literally corroborated what he had written.

  * * *

  Figure 23

  But with all the unearthing of Assyria's and Babylon's grandeur, treasures, and larger-than-life art, the most important discoveries were the countless clay tablets, many assembled in actual libraries, where the first tablet on a shelf listed the titles of the other tablets on that shelf. Throughout Mesopotamia—indeed, throughout the ancient Near East—virtually each major urban center had a library as part of either the royal palace, the main temple, or both. By now, thousands upon thousands of clay tablets (or fragments thereof) have been found; most linger, untranslated, in museum and university basements.

  Of the main libraries discovered, the one of the greatest consequence was Layard's find among the ruins of Nineveh: The great library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (Fig. 24, from his monuments; 668-631 B.C.). It contained more than 25,000 (!) clay tablets. Their inscribed texts—all using cuneiform script—ranged from royal annals and records of workers' rations to commercial contracts and marriage and divorce documents, and included literary texts, historical tales, astronomical data, astrological forecasts, mathematical formulas, word lists, and geographic lists. And then there were rows of tablets with what

  Figure 24

  the archaeologists classified as 'mythological texts'—texts dealing with varied gods, their genealogies, powers, and deeds.

  Ashurbanipal, it turned out, not only collected and brought back to Nineveh such historical and 'mythological' texts from every corner of his empire—he actually employed a legion of scribes to read, sort, preserve, copy, and translate into Akkadian the most important of them. (Depictions of Assyrian scribes show them dressed as dignitaries— attesting to their high status.)

  Most of the tablets discovered at Nineveh were shared between the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople (Istanbul in today's Turkey) and the British Museum in London; some related tablets found their way to the main museums of France and Germany. In London, the British Museum engaged a young banknote engraver and amateur 'Assyriologist' named George Smith to help sort out cuneiform tablets. With a keen ability to recognize a particular characteristic of a cuneiform line, he was the first to realize that various fragmented tablets belonged together, forming continuous narratives (Fig. 25). There was one about a hero and a Flood, another about gods who created

  Figure 25

  Heaven and Earth and also Man. In a Letter to the Editor about it in a London daily, Smith was the first to draw attention to the similarities between the tales in those tablets and the biblical stories in Genesis.

  Of the two ancient story lines, the one of the greatest religious ramifications was the one akin to the biblical tale of Creation; as it happened, the studies in that direction were led by a succession of scholars not in England but in Germany, where pioneering 'Assyriologists' such as Peter Jensen (.Kosmologie der Babylonier), Hermann Gunkel (Schopfung und Chaos), and Friedrich Delitzsch {Das babylonische Weltschopfungsepos) utilized additional finds by the German archaeologists to form a more coherent text and understand its religious, philosophical, and historical scope.

  At the British Museum in London, added to the tablets that Smith had been piecing together were new discoveries by a Layard trainee, Hurmuzd Rassam, at Nineveh and Nimrud. Pursuing the Creation story line, the Museum's Curator of Egyptian and Babylonian Antiquities, Leonard W. King, found that a veritable Epic of Creation was in fact inscribed on no less than seven tablets. His 1902 book, The Seven Tablets of Creation, concluded that a "Standard Text" had existed in Mesopotamia that, like Genesis, told a sequential tale of Creation—from Chaos to a Heaven and an Earth, and then on Earth from the Gathering of the Seas to the Creation of Man—not in the course of the biblical six days plus a day of self-gratification, but over six tablets plus a laudatory seventh.

  The tale's ancient title, conforming to its opening words, was Enuma elish ("When in the Height Above"). Tablets from various sites seemed to have identical texts, except in the name by which the Creator Deity was called (the Assyrians
called him Ashur, the Babylonians Marduk)—suggesting that they were all renditions adapted from a single canonical version in Akkadian. However, the occasional retention of some odd words, and names of celestial deities involved in the events— names such as Tiamat and Nudimmud—suggested that such an original version might not have been in Assyrian/Babylonian Akkadian, but in some other unknown language.

  The search for origins, it was evident, was only beginning.

  * * *

  Back to Victorian England and George Smith: There and at that time, it was the other story line—the tale of the Deluge and a non-biblical 'Noah'—that captured popular imagination. Focusing his attention accordingly, the prolific George Smith, poring over thousands of tablet fragments from Nineveh and Nimrud and matching pieces together, announced that they belonged to a full length epic tale about a hero who discovered the secret of the Great Flood. The three cuneiform signs naming the hero were read by Smith Iz-Du-Bar, and Smith assumed that he was really the biblical Nimrod—the "mighty hunter" who, per Genesis, had started the Assyrian kingdoms—in line with the name of the ancient site, Nimrud, where some of the tablets were found.