Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet: Chapters 1 and 2

“Overview map of the peopling of the world by anatomically modern humans (numbers indicate dates in thousands of years ago [ka]),”

By Katerina Douka & Michelle O’Reilly, Michael D. Petraglia - "On the origin of modern humans: Asian perspectives", Science 08 Dec 2017: Vol. 358, Issue 6368, DOI: 10.1126/science.aai9067 [1], CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71689358

[2nd of 9 Parts]

Chapter 1 - “The Endless Beginning”

In this opening chapter, Sitchin puts forward an issue that has long been a puzzle to scholars and scientists alike: the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens or “modern Man” on our planet.

A “stranger to Earth”—in that like “all living matter on Earth”—it has “too little of the chemical elements that abound on” our planet, modern Man appeared “a mere 700,000 years after Homo erectus and some 200,000 years before Neanderthal Man” (3).

This, science has acknowledged, is quite impossible, since  “the mills of evolution grind much, much slower” (1). 

Was modern Man, then, “imported to Earth from elsewhere, or…as the Old Testament and other ancient texts claim, created by the gods” (4)?

Towards the end of the chapter, Sitchin calls attention to the inability of scholars to explain three things:

First, why, “for the first several millennia after 11,000 B.C.,” the human beings’ “march toward civilization was confined” to the Near East’s highlands (9).

Second, why the discovery of clay, along with its uses, was “contemporary” with the human beings’ “descent from (their) mountain abodes toward the lower, mud-filled valleys” (10).

Third, why “suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably—the Near East witnessed the blossoming of the greatest civilization imaginable,” the Sumerian civilization.

The rest of the chapters addressed all of the aforementioned issues in greater detail, but we may here point out Sitchin’s thematic directions: he will contend and attempt to prove, on the basis of ancient texts and artifacts:

1)  that "technologically sophisticated beings" from another planet, called Nibiru, had settled Earth before the Deluge;

2)  that "the Great Deluge" occurred in about "11,000 B.C.";

3)  that the "survivors of the Flood lived on the mountains east of Sumer for thousands of years until the plains of Sumer had dried up sufficiently to permit human habitations"; and

4)  that they were aided by the Nibiruans who "taught them the arts of animal domestication, agriculture, and, later, pottery making--since clay was still much available, thousands of years after the Great Flood."

 "Sumerian Cities," 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ur3.JPG

Chapter 2 - “The Sudden Civilization”

Focusing on Sumer in this chapter, Sitchin discusses that Sumer—the Land of Shin'ar in the Old Testament—was in “full bloom” in 3,800 B.C..

Sumer, Sitchin continues, can be credited with many “firsts,” among them:

a) the first schools,

b) the first bicameral congress,

c) the first historian,

d) the first pharmacopoeia,

e) the first farmer’s almanac,

f) the first cosmogony and cosmology,

g) the first proverbs and sayings,

h) the first music and song,

i) the first literary debates,

j) the first library catalogue,

k) the first law codes and social reforms,

l) the first medicine,

m) the first agriculture,

n) the first “search for world peace and harmony,”

o) the “first Job,”

p) “first Noah,” and

q) the “first Heroic Age” (46). 

Sumer, as well, built “masterful” Sumerian temples, and invented and developed:

a) the “cylinder seal,” 

b) an “advanced system of mathematics,” 

c) “reinforcing and firing” clay products, 

d) the kiln and the art of metallurgy, 

e) “impressively” high standards of medicine, 

f) textile and clothing industries, 

g) various food preparation methods, 

h) a thriving economy, 

i) shipping, and 

j) the use of the wheel in carts and chariots. 

Sitchin notes two puzzling things towards the chapter’s end: 

One, that the stone tool using humans of 2,000,000 years ago “achieved this unprecedented civilization in Sumer circa 3,800 B.C.;”

Two, that “to this very day the scholars have no inkling who the Sumerians were, where they came from, and how and why their civilization appeared” (49).

The first of these questions is answered directly in the third chapter (in the next article); the second, indirectly in the twelfth chapter (on the creation of the human being).