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).

Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet: Overview, "Author's Note," and "Prologue: Genesis"

“Sitchin posing with an enlarged, purported 6000-year-old cylinder seal impression,” 

 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ZECHARIA_SITCHIN.jpg,

 Lapavaestacaliente [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons

[1st of 9 Parts]

Is it true that there’s a 12^th member of our solar system?

That it played a major role in the stabilization of planetary orbits in the early stages of solar system formation?

That it once collided with the primordial Earth? That it seeded Earth with life and made evolution possible?

That the 12^th planet’s inhabitants upgraded earth’s Homo erectus into Homo sapiens?

That the 12^th planet  catalyzed the occurrence of the Great Deluge?

Is it true that life on Earth as we know it--including civilization, art, and culture—is of extrasolar or extraterrestrial origin?

Zecharia Sitchin (July 11, 1920 – Oct. 9, 2010) answered the aforesaid questions in the affirmative--in his first book, The Twelfth Planet (1976).

If his claims are true, Sitchin may well be the world’s greatest scholar of, among many other things, the origins of life on earth.

Among works that he has authored, his fame rests on The Earth Chronicles, a seven-book account of what happened in many dark areas of prehistory: The 12^th Planet (1976), The Stairway to Heaven (1980), The Wars of Gods and Men (1985), The Lost Realms (1990), When Time Began (1993), The Cosmic Code (1998), and The End of Days (2007).

Sitchin’s research findings are, to say the least, controversial.

Back in 2009 when I first introduced his first book to my humanities classes in the form of a printed 35-page guide, with illustrations reproduced with his permission, the common reaction of my students was one of awe.

Some previous students, however, who had read the book in the late 70s, commented on FB in 2009 and 2010 how Sitchin had given them a bigger picture of prehistory.

In 2010, before Sitchin passed away, I had some of my articles on Sitchin published on the web, through Triond.com--which disbanded without warning in 2015—and along with it, the disappearance of all the articles I submitted.  

Fortunately for me, my laptop still has some of the drafts of my Sitchin articles—and what I write here may already be familiar to some readers.

The purpose of this article—as well as related articles in future—is neither to prove Sitchin right nor wrong, but to simply share, as reader, some highlights from his Twelfth Planet.

I leave it to the more informed readers, scholars, or critics who have read Sitchin, to form their respective views.

Some who have already taken a non-affirmative side, and given information as to why, include Michael S. Heiser, Roger W. Wescott, C. Leroy Ellenberger, Peter James, and William Irwin Thompson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin).

  

Sitchin’s The 12th Planet: Overview

Central to Sitchin’s research findings, as put forth in The Twelfth Planet, seems to be the arrival on Earth in prehistoric times of extraterrestrials or extrasolar beings known as the Anunnaki—the biblical Nefilim, who came to Earth in search of gold needed for their “dwindling atmosphere.”

The first settlers on Earth, they came from Nibiru (Marduk in Babylonian), a planet that, Sitchin writes, visited the solar system once every 3,600 years.

                

Sitchin attributes to the Nibiruans, or Anunnaki, a number of things that appear to shed light on enigmas never before made clear by modern scholarship. These include, among other things:

(1) the penning down in the Enuma elish (Epic of Creation) of events relative to the formation of the solar system;

(2) the “creation” of the human being some 300,000 years ago in Africa (that is, the upgrading of Homo erectus into Homo sapiens);

(3) the intermarriages between the Nefilim and the daughters of humankind some 200,000 years later—that is, circa 100,000 years ago—which angered Enlil, the Nefilim’s supreme commander on Earth, and caused him to plot the annihilation of the humans through ailments and famine (and when the plan did not work, to let them all perish in a forthcoming Great Deluge);

(4) the occurrence of the Great Deluge 13,000 years ago or circa 11,000 B.C.—a date never before made specific, it seems, even by the Old Testament; and

(5) the granting, after the Deluge, of the arts of agriculture and civilization to the survivors of the Flood and their descendants, and, later, of Kingship—until the human beings had “crowded off their gods” (the Nefilim or Anunnaki) from planet Earth.

Will the Nefilim return? The 12^th Planet does not answer this question. 

However, in his The End of Days, the last book of The Earth Chronicles series, Sitchin provides possible time frames, including those of Sir Isaac Newton’s computations of the planet’s return (the subject of a future article).

Shall today's readers take Sitchin's findings as gospel truth?      

Sitchin has quite a great fanbase worldwide who believe in what he has written, though he also has his share of naysayers (as mentioned above), most of whom view his writings as “pseudoscience.”

Sitchin’s “Author’s Note”

In his “Author’s Note” in The Twelfth Planet, Sitchin states that the “prime source for the biblical verses” he quotes (in the said book) is the “Old Testament in its original Hebrew” (vi).

He stresses that “all the translations (he has) consulted” are “just that: translations or interpretations,” and that in the “final analysis, what counts is what the original Hebrew says” (vi).

The point that Sitchin seems to imply is that all translations or interpretations of the Old Testament are in need of updating.

This seems to further imply that non-Hebrew versions of the Old Testament have not always been rendered correctly, or in the appropriate context that they should have been.

For instance, Sitchin notes that the Hebrew word teba, rendered in English as “ark” (which the biblical Noah was said to have used) actually signifies, in the Hebrew text and context, not a mere ship or boat but a “submersible ship” or a “submarine”—the only craft of its kind, Sitchin points out, which could have survived the Great Flood.

Sitchin’s “Prologue: Genesis”

What propelled Sitchin to write The Twelth Planet?

In the said book's “Prologue: Genesis,” he informs that the “seed” for the book “was planted” almost “fifty years ago” when he was “a young schoolboy studying Genesis in its original Hebrew” (vii).

To his teacher’s translation of the term Nefilim (“the sons of the deities”) as “giants,” Sitchin had “objected: didn’t it mean literally ‘Those Who Were Cast Down,’ who had descended to Earth” ?

After 30 years of research, Sitchin “re-created a continuous and plausible scenario of prehistoric events” (viii).

His “evidence” consisted “primarily of the ancient texts”--among them, the Sumerian Kings List, Enuma elish or the Epic of Creation, Atra-Hasis Epic, and many others, as well as “pictures” in cylinder seals and other ancient artifacts (ix).

Related Articles:

Chapters 1 and 2 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2018/12/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters.html

Chapters 3 and 4 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2018/12/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters_27.html

Chapters 5 and 6 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2018/12/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters_29.html

Chapters 7 and 8 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2018/12/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters_31.html

Chapters 9 and 10 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters.html

Chapters 11 and 12 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters_1.html

Chapter 13 and 14 of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapters_54.html

Chapter 15 or Last of The Twelfth Planet

https://penvision.blogspot.com/2019/01/zecharia-sitchins-12th-planet-chapter.html

Router

Blue Eyes. Copyright by Melfe CLC and Ed A

Its blue lights repeatedly twinkle, but it can’t find its role as catalyst for message sending and receiving.  

I tell myself: It’s a gadget created with the limitations of its human creator. Were it alien-made, it would have slashed space and created paths to receive inputs and deliver outputs. Be kind. 

I choose to be kind, allowing it to keep blinking for no connection at all. Nada. 

I’ve countless times tried the instruction that goes with it in the box it was packed in. Switch off... Wait for ten seconds... (The company personnel I called said, “Ten minutes”).  Press the button and release fast. (The company personnel said, “Don’t tamper with the button.”) 

Who was right: the  brochure? …the man?  

Funny how some other things don't match in life. 

(People who say one thing, but mean another.) 

(People who mean well, but are misconstrued as callous.)

(People who are expert on values, but live superbly with their absence.)

(Students who go to school, but never bringing any pens.) 

(Persons who never set foot in school, but have all the marks of culture.) 

(Sons and daughters of teachers and successful merchants who have all the time in the world to be praiseworthy for talent and cultivation, but spend hours out late nights lying about their whereabouts.)  

(Ball pens advertised for smoothness, but take a long time to produce ink.)

(Air-con units ballyhooed for silence, but are notoriously noisy in a few weeks.)

(Routers promoted as nth generation, but yes, like mine, cannot conquer buildings.) 

What awesome business to be in the midst of ironies,  despite 6,000 years since Sumer bloomed into the world's first great civilization.

I turned to friends.

The consensus: I live in a place surrounded by tall buildings. This makes it difficult for my location-- where I live-- to receive signals or sound or radio waves through the only one window of my flat that opens to a small rectangle of space fenced in by high walls.

Maybe, I said to myself, I should leave teaching and start inventing…

Are there really no more inventors who can figure out a way of making routers and signals work, conquering limitations of location, including one window that opens to a small rectangle of space fenced in by high walls?

Anyone there?  

me…me...me...

Stared the router’s eternally blue eyes.

Poveglia Island: World's Most Haunted Still?

By Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7382950

Wikipedia says  Poveglia is “located  between Venice and Lido in the Venetian Lagoon, northern Italy.”   

It consists of a three-part island. The first island is where an octagonal fortress can still be seen—the only one remaining, it has been said, of five octagonal forts constructed in 1645—with the first one  thought  to have been built after Genoa attacked Venice in 1379.  The fort was used in 1776 as a check point for people and products entering and leaving Venice.

On the second island stands a bell tower—what remains of the 12^th century Church of San Vitale. There are also buildings said to have been used as a confinement station or hospital from 1793 to 1814 for those afflicted with the plague and then used as asylum for people suffering from mental illness from 1922 to 1968; sites for administrative operations and houses for staff; and shelters for boats (called cavanas in Italian).

The third island, connected by a bridge to the second, is rumored to have been used for agricultural purposes before it was  abandoned. 

How did Poveglia earn the epithet as the world’s most haunted island?

Most of the articles published on the web point to about more than 160,000 people buried in Poveglia’s plague pits—specific locations still presently unidentified--over the centuries since the bubonic and other plagues visited Europe, including Italy.

Trying to figure out the accuracy of the number of the dead, Ransom Riggs writes that it is possible, stressing that  “in just the plague of 1576 alone, Venice lost 50,000 people (which, creepily, is the current population of Venice) -- and there were at least twenty-two outbreaks of plague in the two hundred years before that” (May 2010, www.mentalfloss.com/article/24658/strange-geographies-happy-haunted-island-poveglia).

It was alleged that victims of the plague who were still alive were burned in plague pits when these were filled to the brim. In this light, Anna Starostinetskaya  writes of Poveglia  as “where you’d sink your feet into the soil (half-dirt, half-human ash) and be in the company of over 100K diseased ghosts”  (Dec. 4, 2013,  www.huffingtonpost.com/off-track-planet/poveglia-island-like-hell_b_4188986.html).

And then there is, according to Tom Kington,  this popular tale of a mad doctor who after having for years  “allegedly experimented on  patients” from  Poveglia’s asylum “with crude lobotomies,” “later threw himself from the hospital tower after claiming he’d been driven mad by ghosts” (April 2014, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10767781/Worlds-most-haunted-island...)

Starostinetskaya informs that the doctor “survived the fall but rumor has it that some sort of mist swallowed him upon landing, effectively finishing the job” (Dec. 4, 2013,  www.huffingtonpost.com/off-track-planet/poveglia-island-like-hell_b_4188986.html)

Anything else?

There was a vampire among the dead.

Riggs recounts that when archaeologists worked on “one grave pit filled with the remains of more than 1,500 plague victims” -- the pit was accidentally found by “work crews on nearby Lazaretto Vecchio” while they were trying to dig “the foundation for a new museum,”—and they “discovered something even more shocking: a vampire. Which is to say, someone who was thought to be a vampire back in the 16th century. The tip off: there was a brick shoved between its teeth, which it was believed would starve the vampire”—more effectively than just sticking a stick through its heart (May 2010, www.mentalfloss. com/article/24658/strange-geographies-happy-haunted-island-poveglia).

Is this--other than the thousands of people who met their death by plague, premature burial, or burning even while still alive—among the reasons why, Wikipedia says, the Calmadolese monks refused Poveglia when it was offered to them in 1521, and the “descendants of original inhabitants” refused “to reconstruct their village on the island” when the government offered it to them in 1661?

Four years ago, in 2014, when the Italian government auctioned Poveglia for a 99-year lease, “Italian businessman Luigi Brugnaro won…with a bid of  €513,000 (roughly $704,000)” (May 14, 2014-updated intro to Ransom Riggs’ May 2010 article, www.mentalfloss.com/article/24658/strange-geographies-happy-haunted-island-poveglia).

Has the lease put an end to Poveglia’s fame as the world’s most haunted island?

On The Literate and The Educated

A Road's Two Faces, Copyright by Melfe CLC & Ed A

It was the last day of the prelim period. Fahad, one of my attentive and silent students in Introduction to Philosophy, approached me after class. He would like some tips on the difference between a literate and an educated person, the report that he got assigned to speak after the weeklong prelim exam.  

I only had five minutes before my driver would pick me up. So I said to Fahad that while many persons may be literate, they may not behave like they’re educated.

It was the difference between knowing and applying what one knows. This was the proverbial gap between knowledge and wisdom. 

Example one: The best speaker in a Communication class explained well what a speaker must consider—so as to make an impact on his audience. But he did not observe silence when other classmates of his presented their reports.

Example two: The brightest student in a Technical Writing class clearly distinguished between denotation and connotation, but submitted a technical report heavy with poetic phrases.

Example three:  A member of the student council  in a Euthenics class waxed eloquent in reporting on  university and classroom policies, but—at the end of the prelim and midterm period—he had  the least  number of hours of class attendance, using  the most abused excuse of there being heavy traffic.

“Find out the common denominator of the students in these examples,” I said. “These are simple examples, but from these are born  crimes against good manners and right conduct.”

Fahad, smiling, seemed to know; he nodded before I finished the second sentence.

Finding Ourselves in the Silence We Create

                                   A Road in Siayan, Copyright by Melfe CLC & Ed A

Silence as Absence of Unwanted Noise

Noise is the presence of unwanted sounds. But as “unwanted sounds” may be “wanted” by others, noise in this respect is a relative term.

We may then, perhaps, redefine noise as that which, at particular times, interferes with one’s desire for silence—the absence of unwanted sound.

Why We Desire Silence

There are many reasons why we sometimes desire silence. Silence eases our ears, rests our thoughts, clears our mind, makes us think better, makes us realize what or who we are at certain stages in our life, makes us remind ourselves what it is we’re really after—that is, silence makes us find ourselves.

Human beings exposed to high decibels for long periods of time may lose not only their ears, but also their minds.  Robbed of proper hearing and of sanity that hinges on silence, human beings are like cards scattered in the wind. They will not find out what or who they are, nor how they are doing in existence; they will not even care whatever happens to them—for they no longer have any sense of self.

Towards Finding Ourselves

Without a clear mind, how can humans shape themselves according to their desired version of themselves? Without a dream, how can humans qualify for a better future? Without a future, how can humans expect to extricate themselves from dreamlessness? How can they be rescued from the scattering of their innate powers to shape life according to sweet wishes?

“Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence,” Desiderata opens. When there is peace in silence, chances are we, as well, find our inmost self -- waiting for us to take care of it, for it is what we do to it that will make us what we wish to be.

Creating Silence and the Self

For silence eases our ears…rests our thoughts…clears our mind…makes us think better…makes us realize what or who we are at certain stages in our life... makes us remind ourselves what it is we are really after...

We must make silence available by finding it, or nourishing it, or creating it.

In so doing, we may yet realize and create the noble self that we wish to be.