Part 4 : Magicians of the Gods..The Fire Next Time...The Antediluvians

Magicians of the Gods

By Graham Hancock

Part 3

The Sages

Chapter 7

The Fire Next Time

Three singularities occurred near the end of the last Ice Age, linked to the sudden onset and equally sudden termination of the mysterious epoch known as the Younger Dryas: 

• Somewhere around 12,800 years ago, after more than two thousand years of uninterrupted global warming (and with a margin of error of plus or minus 150 years that is as close as the resolution of the data allows us to get to the actual moment), a flood of icy meltwater entered the North Atlantic so suddenly and in such quantities that it disrupted ocean circulation. The source of the flood was the North American ice cap. Since the previous two millennia had witnessed continuous sea-level rise, the resolution of the data means there is no way of knowing exactly how much coastal land was swallowed up by this singular event. With so much new water that had previously been locked in ice abruptly added, however, we may surmise that a dramatic and instantaneous rise in sea level did occur. 1 

• In the same geological instant that the meltwater flood was unleashed, global temperatures plummeted and the world’s climate underwent a reversal from that balmy two-thousand-year long “summer” that had begun about 15,000 years ago (by 13,000 years ago, conditions are thought to have improved to such an extent that they were warmer and wetter than they are today) to a savage and icy global winter. Again the resolution of the data does not allow us to say exactly how soon after the meltwater flood the deep-freeze began but, as we saw in the previous chapter, there is much to suggest that this radical reversal of temperatures was achieved within the span of a single human generation. In that same span the ice sheets that had everywhere been melting and in retreat began remorselessly to re-advance and sea-level rise ceased. 

• Around 11,600 years ago, again with a margin of error of 150 years in either direction imposed by the data—but again apparently within a single generation—the freeze suddenly ended, global temperatures soared, and the remnant ice caps collapsed, shedding their residual water burden into the world’s oceans which rose dramatically to close to today’s level. 

Our ancestors passed through these tumultuous changes and it is inconceivable that they would not have remarked upon them or sought to speak about their experiences to one another. Their stories and eyewitness accounts, would, in turn, have become part of revered oral traditions and as such would have been passed down from generation to generation until they became hoary with age. As the reader will recall from Chapter Three, certain Native American “myths” do, absolutely, seem to speak of events at the end of the last Ice Age. The terrible floods that scoured and ravaged the land are described in detail. But of even greater interest are the traditions of the “star with the long wide tail” that “came down here once, thousands of years ago,” that “burned up everything” and that “made a different world” in which “the weather was colder than before.” 

These traditions appear to memorialize the devastating effects of the comet impact that we can now date conclusively, within the understood margins of error, to around 12,800 years ago. We’ve seen how scientists Richard Firestone, Allen West, Jim Kennett and others believe the comet broke into multiple fragments, perhaps eight of which—some with diameters approaching two kilometers— hit the North American ice cap generating huge amounts of heat and instantly transforming great masses of ice into the floods of meltwater that disrupted oceanic circulation and played a key role in bringing on the deep freeze of the Younger Dryas. The reader will also recall that other fragments of the giant comet are thought to have hit the Northern European ice cap and to have gone on to rain down on even more distant lands as far away as the Middle East. Thus, though the epicenter was in North America, it is not surprising that the Younger Dryas was a global event that affected peoples and cultures all around the world. 

What is surprising is the remarkable consistency with which traditions from every part of the globe speak not only of cataclysmic events but also of very specific warnings given to certain selected “wise” or “good” or “pure” humans in advance of the impending cataclysm. We saw several examples of such warnings in the Native American traditions reviewed in Chapter Three, but if we travel oceans and continents away from the epicenter of the impacts we find similar accounts of warnings preserved in the Middle East at the farthest extent to which the effects of the comet have so far been documented. Note this does not mean that the “strewn field” of comet debris is confined to the 50 million square kilometers presently recognized. It simply means that samples of sediment from other regions have thus far not been assayed for nanodiamonds, magnetic and glassy spherules, melt glass, platinum and other tell-tale proxies of impact.  

Up to the limit of research so far done, however, the site farthest from North America that has produced firm evidence of the presence and effects of the Younger Dryas comet is an archaeological mound, or tell, called Abu Hureyra in Syria which was excavated in 1974 just before completion of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River caused it to disappear forever beneath the advancing waters of Lake Assad. Sediment samples from the archaeological trenching of Abu Hureyra were removed and preserved before the site was flooded and it was the Younger Dryas Boundary layer of one of these samples (from Trench E, and dated to 12,800 years ago) that Firestone, West, Kennett and their team assayed in 2012. As we saw in Chapter Five, they found nanodiamonds, abundant cosmic impact spherules and melt-glass that could only have formed at temperatures in excess of 2,200 degrees Celsius suggesting that the site was “near the center of a high-energy air-burst/impact.” 2 

Abu Hureyra cannot be subjected to further direct archaeological investigation since it now lies under Lake Assad, but Firestone, Kennett and West believe the effects of the comet on “that settlement and its inhabitants would have been severe.” 3 Of note is the fact that the site lies close both to southeastern Turkey, where Göbekli Tepe is situated, and to the modern state of Iran—formerly Persia —where traditions of great antiquity have been preserved in the scriptures of Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic religion of ancient Persia. 

“The fatal winters are going to fall…” 

Exactly how old Zoroastrianism is has not yet been satisfactorily established by scholars, since even the lifetime of its prophet Zarathustra (more usually known as Zoroaster) is uncertain. Indeed, as Columbia University’s authoritative Encyclopedia Iranica admits: “Controversy over Zarathustra’s date has been an embarrassment of long standing to Zoroastrian studies.” 4 

The Greek historians were among the first to address themselves to the matter. Plutarch, for example, tells us that Zoroaster “lived 5,000 years before the Trojan War” 5 (itself a matter of uncertain historicity but generally put at around 1300 BC, thus 5,000 plus 1,300 = 6300 BC). A similar chronology is given by Diogenes Laertius who relates that Zoroaster lived “6,000 years before Xerxes’ Greek campaign” 6 (i.e. around 6480 BC). More recent scholars have proposed dates as far apart as 1750 BC and “258 years before Alexander” 7 (i.e. around 588 BC). Whatever the truth of the matter, it is agreed that Zoroaster himself borrowed from much earlier traditions and that Zoroastrianism, therefore, like many other religions, has roots that extend very far back into prehistory. 

In the Zoroastrian scriptures known as the Zend Avesta certain verses in particular are recognized as drawing on these very ancient oral traditions. 8 The verses speak of a primordial father figure called Yima, the first man, the first king and the founder of civilization and appear in the opening section of the Zend Avesta known as the Vendidad. There we read how the god Ahura Mazda created the first land, “Airyana Vaejo, by the good river Daitya,” 9 as a paradise on earth and how “the fair Yima, the great shepherd … was the first mortal” with whom Ahura Mazda chose to converse, instructing him to become a preacher. 10 Yima refused, at which the god set him a different task: 

Since thou wantest not to be the preacher and the bearer of my law, then make my world thrive, make my world increase; undertake thou to nourish, to rule and to watch over my world. 11 

To this Yima agreed at which the god presented him with a golden ring and a poniard—a long, tapered thrusting knife—inlaid with gold. Significantly, for we will see in Chapter Seventeen there are close parallels to this story as far away as the Andes mountains of South America, Yima then: 

pressed the earth with the golden ring and bored it with the poniard. 12 

By this act, we learn he “made the earth grow larger by one third than it was before,” a feat that over the course of thousands of years he repeated twice more—in the process eventually doubling the land area available for “the flocks and herds with men and dogs and birds,” who gathered unto him “at his will and wish, as many as he wished.” 13 

Anatomically modern humans like ourselves have existed, so far as we know, for a little less than two hundred thousand years (the earliest anatomically modern human skeleton acknowledged by science is from Ethiopia and dates to 196,000 years ago). 14 Within this time-span there has been only one period when those parts of the earth that are useful to humans increased dramatically in size and that was during the last Ice Age between 100,000 and 11,600 years ago. Indeed, previously submerged lands totaling 27 million square kilometers—equivalent to the area of Europe and China added together—were exposed by lowered sea-levels at the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago. While it is probably far-fetched to suppose that it is this very real increase of useful land—of which a great part was still above water at the beginning of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago—that is referred to in the Yima story, or that it has anything to do with the golden age that Yima’s benign rule supposedly achieved in Airyana Vaejo, 15 it is interesting to note what happened next. 

After another immense span of time, we read, Yima was summoned to “a meeting place by the good river Daitya” where the god Ahura Mazda appeared to him bearing an ominous warning of sudden and catastrophic climate change: 

O fair Yima, upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall, that shall bring the fierce, foul frost; upon the material world the fatal winters are going to fall that shall make snowflakes fall thick, even on the highest tops of mountains … 

Therefore make thee a Vara [a hypogeum, or underground enclosure] long as a riding ground on every side of the square, and thither bring the seeds of sheep and oxen, of men, of dogs, of birds, and of red blazing fires … Thither thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women of the greatest, best and finest kinds on this earth; thither shalt thou bring the seeds of every kind of cattle, of the greatest, best and finest kinds on this earth. Thither shalt thou bring the seeds of every kind of tree, of the greatest, best and finest kinds on this earth; thither shalt thou bring the seeds of every kind of fruit, the fullest of food and sweetest of odor. All those seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara. There shall be no humpbacked, none bulged forward there; no impotent, no lunatic … no leprous. 16 

So … you get the idea? This underground hideaway was to serve as a refuge from a terrible winter that was about to seize Airyana Vaejo, a winter at the onset of which, as the Bundahishn, another Zoroastrian text, informs us: 

the evil spirit … sprang like a snake out of the sky down to the earth … He rushed in at noon, and thereby the sky was as shattered and frightened by him as a sheep by a wolf. He came onto the water which was arranged below the earth, and then the middle of this earth was pierced and entered by him … He rushed out upon the whole creation and he made the world quite as injured and dark at midday as though it were dark night. 17 

Studying these accounts I couldn’t help but be reminded of the two millennia of warm, fine weather, which must indeed have seemed like a golden age, before the sudden lethal onset of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago. The Zoroastrian texts would not be far wrong in describing it as a “fierce, foul frost” and as “a fatal winter.” The “evil spirit” to whom this affliction is attributed is Angra Mainyu, the agent of darkness, destruction, wickedness and chaos, who stands in opposition to and seeks to undermine and undo all the good works of Ahura Mazda—for Zoroastrianism is a profoundly dualistic religion in which human beings, and the choices we make for good or evil, are seen as the objects of an eternal competition, or contest, between the opposed forces of darkness and light. 

And in this contest the darkness sometimes wins. Thus the Vendidad reminds us that although Airyana Vaejo was “the first of the good lands and countries” created by Ahura Mazda, it could not resist the evil one: 

Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created by his witchcraft the serpent in the river, and winter, a work of the demons … [Now] there are ten winter months there, two summer months, and these are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees. Winter falls there, with the worst of its plagues. 18 

In other translations the phrase “the serpent in the river, and winter” is given as “a great serpent and Winter” and, alternatively, as “a mighty serpent and snow.” 19 

Again … you get the idea. The metaphor that is being repeatedly driven home here is that of the mighty serpent who springs from the sky down to the earth, who penetrates the earth, and who brings a prolonged winter upon the world so severe that it is “dark” (“most turbid, opaque” according to some translations 20  at midday, and even the fleeting summer months are too cold for human life. Once again, the whole scenario seems very accurately to describe the terrible conditions that would have afflicted the world after the Younger Dryas comet spread its trail of destruction across at least 50 million square kilometers, brought on “a vehement destroying frost” and threw such quantities of dust into the upper atmosphere, together with smoke from the continent-wide wildfires sparked off by airbursts and superheated ejecta, that a turbid, opaque darkness would indeed have filled the skies, reflecting back the sun’s rays and perpetuating something very like a nuclear winter for centuries. 

The Zoroastrian texts leave us in no doubt that these conditions posed a deadly threat to the future survival of civilization. It was for this reason that Ahura Mazda came to Yima with his warning and his instruction to build an underground shelter where some remnant of humanity could take refuge, keeping safe the seeds of all animals and plants, until the dire winter had passed and spring returned to the world. Moreover the account reveals very little that seems “mythical,” or that obviously derives from flights of religious fancy. Rather the whole thing has about it an atmosphere of hardheaded practical planning that adds a chilling note of veracity. 

For example the admonition that deformed, impotent, lunatic and leprous people should be kept out of the Vara sounds a lot like eugenics, a distasteful policy to be sure, but one that might be implemented if the survival of the human race was at stake and there was limited space available in the refuge. For the same reasons it is not surprising that only the seeds of “the greatest, best and finest” kinds of trees, fruits and vegetables, those that are “fullest of food and sweetest of odor” are to be brought to the Vara. Why waste space on anything but the best? 

Also although it is certain that a number of carefully selected people were to be admitted to the Vara, perhaps as caretakers and managers of the project, and as future breeding stock, the emphasis throughout is on seeds—which in the case of human beings would be sperm from the males and eggs from the females. So when we read that the Vara is to be constructed in three subterranean levels, each smaller than the one above, each with its own system of criss-crossing “streets,” it is legitimate to wonder whether some kind of storage system, perhaps with ranks of shelves arranged in crisscrossing aisles, might not really be what is meant here: 

In the largest part of the place thou shalt make nine streets, six in the middle part, three in the smallest. To the streets of the largest part thou shalt bring a thousand seeds of men and women; to the streets of the middle part, six hundred; to the streets of the smallest part, three hundred. 21 

If it seems fanciful to imagine that we might, in an almost high-tech sense, be looking at the specifications of a seed bank here, then how are we to assess other “technological” aspects of the Vara—for example its lighting system? As well as making a door to the place, and sealing it up with the golden ring already given to him by Ahura Mazda, Yima is also to fashion “a window, self-shining within.” 22 When Yima asks for clarification as to the nature of this “self-shining” window Ahura Mazda tells him cryptically, “There are uncreated lights and created lights.” The former are the stars, the moon and the sun, which will not be seen from within the confines of the Vara during the long winter, but the latter are “artificial lights” which “shine from below.” 23 

Yima did as he was instructed and completed the Vara which, thereafter, “glowed with its own light.” 24 That accomplished, he then: 

made waters flow in a bed a mile long; there he settled birds, by the evergreen banks that bear never-failing food. There he established dwelling places, consisting of a house with a balcony, a courtyard and a gallery …25 

There, too, we are reminded, in accord with the commands of the god, 

he brought the seeds of men and women … There he brought the seeds of every kind of tree [and] … every kind of fruit … All those seeds he brought, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so long as those men shall stay in the Vara …26 

Finally, we learn that: 

every fortieth year, to every couple two are born, a male and a female. And thus it is for every sort of cattle. And the men in the Vara, which Yima made, live the happiest life. 27 

Interestingly the translator explains, in a footnote drawn from various ancient learned commentaries on the text, that the human inhabitants of the Vara “live there for 150 years; some say they never die.” 28 Moreover, and particularly intriguing, the births of offspring to every couple do not result from sexual union but “from the seeds deposited in the Vara.” 29 

Other hints of a mysterious lost technology connected to Yima include a miraculous cup in which he could see everything that was happening anywhere in the world and a jeweled glass throne (sometimes described as “a glass chariot”) that was capable of flight. 30 

Flood and rain 

As well as a climate catastrophe in the form of an overnight reversion to peak Ice Age cold, we also know that the Younger Dryas involved extensive global flooding as a large fraction of the North American ice cap melted and poured into the world ocean. It is therefore noteworthy that the Zoroastrian texts speak not only of the “vehement, destroying frost” of a global winter but also of an associated flood accompanied by heavy precipitation, in which: 

Every single drop of rain became as big as a bowl and the water stood the height of a man over the whole of this earth. 31

On the other side of the world and much closer to the North American epicenter of the cataclysm, the Popol Vuh, an original document of the ancient Quiche Maya of Guatemala, based on pre-conquest sources, also speaks of a flood and associates it with “much hail, black rain and mist, and indescribable cold.” 32 It says, in a remarkable echo of the Zoroastrian tradition, that this was a period when “it was cloudy and twilight all over the world … The faces of the sun and the moon were covered.” 33 Other Maya sources confirm that these strange and terrible phenomena were experienced by mankind “in the time of the ancients. The earth darkened … It happened that the sun was still bright and clear. Then, at midday, it got dark…” 34 Sunlight was not seen again “until the twenty-sixth year after the flood.” 35 

Returning to the Middle East, the famous account of the Hebrew patriarch Noah and the great Ark in which he rides out the flood commands attention. It is obvious that there are many parallels with the story of Yima and his Vara. The Vara, after all, is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating winter which will destroy every living creature by enchaining the earth in a freezing trap of ice and snow. The Ark, likewise, is a means of surviving a terrible and devastating flood which will destroy every living creature by drowning the world in water. In both cases a deity—Ahura Mazda in the case of the Zoroastrian tradition, the God Yahweh in the case of the Hebrew tradition—intervenes to give advance warning to a good and pure man to prepare for the coming cataclysm. In each case the essence of the project is to preserve the seeds, or the breeding pairs, of all life: 

And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the Ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. 36 

Easily missed, but noteworthy, is the fact that Noah’s Ark, like Yima’s Vara, is to have a “window,” is to be closed with a “door” and is to consist of three levels: 

A window shalt thou make to the Ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the Ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. 37 

Last but not least, there are hints of a lost lighting technology in Noah’s Ark that parallel the references to the “artificial lights” in the Vara. In The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg’s remarkable and comprehensive compilation of ancient stories and traditions connected to the Hebrew Bible, we read that the whole journey of the Ark, “during the year of the flood,” was conducted in darkness both by day and by night: 

All the time it lasted, the sun and the moon shed no light …38 

However just like the “self-shining window” of the Vara: 

The Ark was illuminated by a precious stone, the light of which was more brilliant by night than by day, so enabling Noah to distinguish between day and night. 39 

Underground cities 

Noah’s Ark, as is well known, is said to have ended its journey on the slopes of Mount Ararat, the symbolic heartland of ancient Armenia but now, as a result of wars in the early twentieth century, located within the modern state of Turkey. Turkey, in turn, shares a border with Iran—ancient Persia —from which the accounts of Yima’s Vara come down to us. 

It is therefore intriguing that Turkey’s Cappadocia region has a very large number of ancient underground structures hewn out of solid rock and usually, like the Vara, consisting of multiple levels stacked one above the other. These underground “cities,” as they are known, include the eerie and spectacular site of Derinkuyu, which I was able to visit in 2013. Lying beneath a modern town of the same name, eight of its levels are presently open to the public, although further levels remain closed off below and, astonishingly, a subterranean tunnel several kilometers in length connects it to another similar hypogeum at Kaymakli. 

Entering Derinkuyu was like crossing some invisible barrier into an unexpected netherworld. One minute I was standing in bright sunshine; the next, after I had ducked into the cool, dank, dimly-lit system of tunnels and galleries (no self-shining windows now; only low wattage electric light), I felt I had been transported to a realm carved out by mythical dwarves at the dawn of time. In places the tunnels are low and narrow so that one must stoop and walk in single file between walls stained and blackened with ancient smoke and overgrown here and there with green mold. At regular intervals, slid back into deep recesses, I passed hulking megalithic doors, shaped like millstones, 5 to 6 feet (1.5 to 1.8 meters) in diameter and weighing close to half a ton. These were clearly designed to be rolled out to block access. Stairways and steep ramps led down from level to level and, although all the levels were interconnected, the rolling stone doors could be used to isolate them from one another when needed. 

I noticed a remarkable system of plunging, sheer-sided ventilation shafts connecting the deepest levels with the surface—and doing so to such good effect that the gusts of fresh air were still palpable 80 meters (260 feet) or more beneath the ground. In some places the passageway I was following would debouch into a junction where tunnels branched off in several directions and more stairways led down to even lower levels. And here and there, now to one side of the passageway, now to the other, sometimes accessed by means of holes cut in the wall, sometimes through full-sized doorways, lay small low-ceilinged grottos in which even a few people sitting together would have felt cramped. But sometimes those doors would lead into interconnected networks of chambers and passages and sometimes they would open out suddenly into lofty halls and spacious rooms with barrel-vault ceilings looming high overhead, supported on monolithic columns hewn from the living rock. 

The whole place, in short, is a complex and cunning labyrinth on an immense scale—a work of astonishing architectural complexity that would be impressive if it had been built above ground, but that is utterly breathtaking when one considers that it all had to be mined, chiseled, hammered, cut and gouged out of the volcanic bedrock. Later, studying a plan, I realized that this vast hypogeum, looking in cross-section like a gigantic rabbit warren and extending over an area of more than 4 square kilometers, 40 lay underfoot wherever one went in the modern town of Derinkuyu, streets beneath streets, rooms beneath rooms, a secret antipodal city of unknown antiquity and of unknown purpose but certainly the product of immense ingenuity, determination and skill. 

And Derinkuyu is just one of two hundred such subterranean complexes, each containing a minimum of two levels (with around forty containing three levels or more) that have been identified in Turkey in the area between Kayseri and Nevsehir. 41 Moreover, new discoveries are constantly being made. Derinkuyu itself was found in 1963 after builders renovating the cellar of a modern home broke through to an ancient passageway below. And most recently, in 2014, workers preparing the ground for a new housing project at Nevsehir, an hour’s drive north of Derinkuyu, stumbled upon yet another unsuspected hypogeum. Archaeologists were called in and it was quickly realized that this one was bigger than any others so far known. As Hasan Unver, Mayor of Nevsehir put it, Derinkuyu and Kaymakli are little more than “kitchens” when compared to the newly-explored site. “It is not a known underground city,” added Mehmet Ergun Turan, head of Turkey’s Housing Development Administration. “Tunnel passages of seven kilometers are being discussed. Naturally, when the discovery was made, we stopped the construction we were planning to do in the area.” 42 

Several commentators immediately speculated that the newly discovered site might be “5,000 years old,” 43 but there is no basis for this—or really for any date. All we can say for sure is that the earliest surviving historical mention of Turkey’s underground cities is found in the Anabapsis of the Greek historian Xenophon written in the fourth century BC 44—so they are older than that. 

But the question is, how much older? 

As the reader will recall from Chapter One, there is no objective way to date structures made entirely of rock. What archaeologists look for, therefore, are organic materials that can be carbon dated. To be useful, however, these organic materials must be excavated from locations—under a megalith that has never been moved, for example, or in the original mortar in a joint between two stone blocks—that allow reasonable deductions to be made about the date the associated structural elements were put in place. 

This is why the mysterious decision by the builders of Göbekli Tepe to bury the megalithic enclosures there has been so helpful to archaeology. Once buried they stayed buried and organic materials in the fill can thus be used to make valuable inferences about their age. In many other sites, by contrast, there is the possibility that the intrusion of later organic materials will give a falsely young date, and in some—the underground cities of Turkey being a prime example—no reliable dating can be done. This is because the sites were used, reused and indeed repurposed many times down the ages by many different peoples, with organic materials being introduced on every occasion, thus making it impossible to draw any inferences about the epoch of their original construction. 

The general view of archaeologists is that the underground structures were originally developed in the seventh or eighth centuries BC by an Indo-European people called the Phrygians who lived in Cappadocia at the time. The theory is that the Phrygians began the project by widening and deepening natural caves and tunnels that already existed in the volcanic rock, making use of the spaces they created for storage and possibly as places of refuge from attackers. 

By Roman times, with the Phrygians long gone, the inhabitants of the area were Greek-speaking Christians who further developed and expanded the underground caverns, rededicating some of the rooms as chapels and leaving inscriptions in Greek, some of which survive to this day. In the Byzantine era, from the eighth to the twelfth centuries AD, the Eastern Roman Empire was locked in wars with newly Islamicized Arabs and the underground cities became places of refuge again—a function they continued to serve during the Mongol invasions of the fourteenth century AD. Later still, Greek Christians used the cities to escape persecution at the hands of Turkish Muslim rulers, and this practice continued into the twentieth century when the structures finally fell into disuse after the truce and population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. 45 

With such a checkered history it is easy to see why the underground cities cannot be dated using objective archaeological techniques. Moreover the vast effort that went into their excavation out of solid rock, and their sophisticated ventilation systems, speak of powerful long-term motives far beyond the limited and temporary need for shelter from attackers. With this in mind let us consider a scenario in which the Phrygians, favored for no good reason by archaeologists as the first makers of the cities, were themselves just one of the many later cultures to make use of them. It is perfectly possible that this is the case and, if so, then it is also possible that these extraordinary underground structures might date back to a time long before the Phrygians—perhaps even as far back as the “fatal winters” of the Younger Dryas that set in around 12,800 years ago. 

There is no proof of this, of course. Nonetheless Turkish historian and archaeologist Omer Demir, author of Cappadocia: Cradle of History, is of the opinion that Derinkuyu does in fact date back to the Palaeolithic. 46 His argument is based partly on the notion that it already existed in Phrygian times, 47 partly on stylistic differences between the upper (older) levels and the lower (younger) levels 48 and partly on the fact that marks of the implements used to cut the rock have worn completely away in the upper levels but are still visible in the lower levels: 

It is necessary for a long period of time to pass for the chisel marks to disappear. This means that there was quite a time difference between the years of construction of the first stories and the last stories. 49 

Demir also suggests that the huge quantities of rock excavated to make the underground city—which are nowhere in evidence in the vicinity today—were dumped into local streams and carried off. 50 In one of these streams, the Sognali, at a distance of 26 kilometers (16 miles) from Derinkuyu, handaxes, rock-chips and other Palaeolithic artifacts were found. 51 

The evidence is suggestive at best. I would not want to bet my life or my reputation on it! Nonetheless the scenario that sees Derinkuyu and the other underground cities constructed in the Upper Palaeolithic around 12,800 years ago at the onset of the Younger Dryas has the great merit of no longer leaving us casting about for a motive commensurate with the huge effort involved. We are informed of that motive quite explicitly in the story of Yima. Stated simply, the cities are Varas, cut down into the depths of the earth as places of refuge from the horrors of the Younger Dryas, which were not limited to the “vehement destroying frost” but—as we know from the cosmic impact spherules and melt-glass found in sediment samples at nearby Abu Hureyra—also included the terrifying threat of bombardment from the skies. 

Like a snake out of the sky 

It is close to certain, if our planet did indeed cross the path of a giant comet 12,800 years ago as Firestone, Kennett and West maintain, that the bombardment would not have been limited to the large fragments that came down during the first event. The comet’s debris stream would have remained on an earth-crossing orbit and would very likely have resulted in decades, perhaps even centuries, of subsequent bombardments—not on the same scale of intensity as the initial encounter, but nonetheless able to cause catastrophic damage and to spread enough fear and dismay of the mighty “serpent” lingering in the heavens to justify the construction of secure underground shelters. 

Indeed, as we will see, the earth may still cross the debris stream of the giant Younger Dryas comet today and large, deadly objects, blacker than coal, invisible to our telescopes, may still be orbiting in that stream today. I’m reminded again of the Ojibwa prophecy reviewed in Chapter Three: 

The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That’s the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. 

Is the Younger Dryas comet coming back? Could it be that it did not spend all its anger and destructive force with the fragments that hit the earth and caused the vehement destroying winter of the Younger Dryas 12,800 years ago? 

Curiously the ancient Iranian traditions contain a prophecy also, for it is said that Yima will return, and will walk again among men, when: 

the signs foreshadowing the last of days appear. Of these the worst will be a winter more terrible than any the world has seen before when it will rain and snow and hail for three long years. 52 

The fiery descent of more fragments of the comet could bring about such a winter, just as happened 12,800 years ago. And just as happened then, it would do so in part because the skies would be darkened by debris and smoke from the wildfires caused by airbursts and by the superheated ejecta from the impacts on land. These are grave matters, and we will return to them in Chapter Nineteen. But first we must consider the story of Noah, the Hebrew counterpart of Yima, carried by the waters of the flood—so we are told—to the slopes of Mount Ararat, just a few days’ walk from Göbekli Tepe. The Noah story also contains a prophecy which is made manifest in the New Testament, 2 Peter 3: 3–7: 

By water the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. 

Or as the old song has it: 

God gave Noah the rainbow sign: no more water, the fire next time.

8 

The Antediluvians 

The Biblical story of the Deluge is too familiar to require extensive repetition here. The essential elements can be summarized as follows: 

• A life-destroying global flood, sent by God to punish human wickedness. 1 

• A man (Noah) selected by God and given advance warning of the coming cataclysm so that he can build a survival ship (the Ark). 2 

• The preservation in the Ark of the seeds, or breeding pairs, of all forms of life, with a particular emphasis on human life (Noah and his wife together with their sons and their wives) and animal life (“of fowls after their kind,” as we saw in the last chapter, “and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive”). 3 

• The Ark rides out the flood until the waters subside. 4 

• The Ark comes to rest “on the mountains of Ararat.” 5 

• When the waters have “dried up from the earth” God instructs Noah to leave the Ark with his family and to “bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.” 6 

• Noah builds an altar on which he sacrifices some of the animals and birds that he has just saved from the flood. The smell of the burned offerings is pleasing to God. 7 

• The surviving humans and animals go forth and multiply “and fill the earth” as they have been commanded. 8 

Mount Ararat rises to 5,137 meters (16,853 feet) and geologists assure us, on the basis of excellent science, that no part of it has ever been covered by oceanic floodwaters since it began to take shape as a mountain near the end of the early Miocene some sixteen million years ago. The presence of anatomically modern humans in the world, as we saw in the last chapter, cannot be traced back further than two hundred thousand years, and even the last common ancestor with the chimpanzee—a creature that was very far from being in any sense “human”—takes us back barely six million years, so the notion of a boat with humans on board being washed up on Mount Ararat is a chronological impossibility. 

Nonetheless, it is intriguing that the story of the Deluge as given in the Old Testament makes specific and deliberate mention of “the mountains of Ararat” (the “Mount” does in fact have twin peaks) which, in Biblical times, were understood as being part of the “Kingdom of Ararat,” 9 the historic land of Urartu, conquered by the Assyrian King Shalmaneser in the late second millennium BC. 10 Due to the limited archaeology that has been undertaken in the region, historians confess that “the origins of Urartu must remain obscure,” 11 but the earliest known settlements and the beginnings of agriculture in the region have been traced back to “approximately 10,000 to 9000 BC” 12—in other words to the period of Göbekli Tepe. 

Moreover, this whole area, Mount Ararat and Göbekli Tepe very much included, formed the heartland of historic Armenia, the direct descendant of the Biblical Kingdom of Ararat whose inhabitants saw—and still today see—themselves as “the Peoples of Ararat.” 13 Written in the fifth century AD, Moses Khorenatsi influential History of the Armenians attributed the founding of the nation to the patriarch Haik, who, it was said, was the great-great-great-grandson of Noah himself and thus in the close lineage of the flood survivors who emerged from the Ark. 14 Indeed it is because of Haik that even in the twenty-first century Armenians still refer to themselves as Hai, and to their land as Haiastan. 15 They see it simply as a tragedy of history that so much of this land, again including Göbeklitepe and Mount Ararat, is now in the possession of the Republic of Turkey, following the Armenian genocide of 1915–23 in which more than one million ethnic Armenians are believed to have been killed by Turkish forces. 16 

Nationalistic feelings still run high in the communities of the Armenian diaspora scattered around the world and in the tiny rump of historic Armenia that forms the Armenian Republic today. These tensions have not left Göbekli Tepe untouched, and many Armenians are outraged that Turkey claims this uniquely important site as its own heritage as though the ancient Armenian connection did not even exist. A few minutes’search on the internet using the keyword “Portasar,” the former Armenian name of Göbekli Tepe, will confirm this. I’ll give a single example here, a YouTube video entitled “Turkey Presents Armenian Portasar as Turkish Göbekli Tepe.” 17 Among the comments, fairly typical of the remarks made by many viewers, we read: 

This is the way I look at Portasar (Göbekli Tepe). These people deliberately buried a sacred temple. They did this in the anticipation of having it discovered many years in the future. They believed in reincarnation. Those people who built Portasar (Göbekli Tepe) are here among the Armenians. Their spirits have transcended into the Armenian people of today. When you pass on something in your family you want to make sure that it goes to only that family member and no one else. Portasar and those lands will be returned back to the Armenians in accordance with the laws of nature …18 

In the same vein, though now entirely within the borders of Turkey, Mount Ararat remains a potent symbol of Armenian nationalism. A landscape of Mount Ararat, with the floodwaters receding and Noah’s Ark at the summit, dominates the coat of arms of the Republic of Armenia while the mountain itself—so near and yet so far—looms over the Armenian capital city Yerevan, a haunting and ever present reminder that: 

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. 19 

Thus there are many ways in which the story of Noah and his Ark, and of a world made anew after a terrible global cataclysm, is still a living force in the region of Göbekli Tepe, that mysterious sanctuary in the Taurus mountains where the great stone circles began to be put in place in 9600 BC— a date that marks the exact end of the long “fatal winter” of the Younger Dryas. As Klaus Schmidt asked me rhetorically when I interviewed him at the site (see Chapter One): 

How likely is it to be an accident that the monumental phase at Göbeklitepe starts in 9600 BC, when the climate of the whole world has taken a sudden turn for the better and there’s an explosion in nature and in possibilities? 

There’s something else about that date too. Just as the beginning of the Younger Dryas in 10,800 BC was accompanied by huge global floods and an episode of rapidly rising sea levels, as icy meltwater from the North American ice cap poured suddenly into the Atlantic Ocean, 20 so too a second global flood occurred around 9600 BC as the remnant ice caps in North America and northern Europe collapsed simultaneously amidst worldwide global warming. The late Cesare Emiliani, Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, carried out isotopic analysis of deep-sea sediments 21 that produced striking evidence of cataclysmic global flooding “between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago.” 22 

So although the floods at the end of the Ice Age could never have carried Noah and his Ark thousands of feet above present sea level to the slopes of Mount Ararat, they were indeed global in their extent and would have had devastating consequences for humans living at that time. Mountainous regions such as the Ararat range would have been natural places of refuge—natural places to bring “the seeds of all life” and to start again. Therefore, while the Noah story cannot be literally true in every detail, we must consider the possibility that it is true in its essence, i.e. that it does record the construction of an “Ark,” in which seeds of useful plants and breeding pairs of animals were perhaps preserved by people who already knew agriculture and who possessed architectural skills, who survived the Flood, who migrated to the lands between Mount Ararat and Göbekli Tepe, and who subsequently disseminated agricultural and architectural knowledge to the indigenous hunter-gatherers of that region. 

The sudden, and indeed completely unprecedented, appearance of giant stone circles at Göbekli Tepe, which surely could only have been conceived and implemented by people with extensive prior experience of megalithic architecture, and the simultaneous “invention” of agriculture in the exact same locale, are, in my view, highly suggestive of this possibility. Then, too, there is the haunting sense that Göbekli Tepe itself constitutes a kind of “Ark” frozen and memorialized in stone, for its iconography is not only all about animals but also—in a number of intriguing reliefs that show women with exposed genitalia 23 and males with erect penises 24—about human fertility. Imagery of the latter sort, including a figure that Karl Luckert, Professor of the History of Religions at Missouri State University, interprets as a classic “Earth Mother,” 25 call to mind God’s command to Moses and his family to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.” 26 

Meanwhile, where else but in Noah’s Ark can we find a menagerie as eclectic as the one portrayed on the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe—a menagerie, as we saw in Chapter One, that includes spiders, scorpions and snakes (“every creeping thing of the earth”), birds and cattle (“fowls after their kind, and cattle after their kind”), and foxes, felines, goats, sheep, gazelles, boars, bears, etc, etc (in short—as Genesis 6: 20 has it, “every kind of animal and every kind of creature”)? 

A final touch. Noah sacrificed some of the animals and birds that he had just saved from the Flood as an offering to God. At Göbekli Tepe archaeologists have found the butchered bones of many of the animal species depicted on the megalithic pillars. 27 

Cities from before the Flood 

It has long been recognized by scholars that the Biblical Flood narrative is not original to the Old Testament but was borrowed from a much earlier source, indeed a source dating back to the oldest true civilization so far acknowledged by archaeology—ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, which arose in the fifth millennium BC, flourished during the fourth and third millennia BC, and survived into the second millenium BC. 28 The two earliest surviving written versions of this global flood “myth” can be seen today at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 29 and in the private Schøyen Collection in Norway. 30 Both are written in cuneiform characters in the Sumerian language and both have come down to us as fragments rather than complete texts. 

Of the two, however, it is the University of Pennsylvania tablet, found during excavations of the Sumerian city of Nippur 31 (located on the Euphrates 200 kilometers south of the modern city of Baghdad) that is the most complete, consisting of the lower third of what was once a six-column tablet of baked clay 32 and dated to the seventeenth century BC. 33 The Schøyen tablet, though less of it survives, is a little older (dated to the nineteenth to eighteenth centuries BC 34 ), repeats some of the lines of the Pennsylvania fragment and adds a few new details not found elsewhere. 35 

Figure 26: Map of Ancient Sumer showing the antediluvian cities 

What rare and precious things these little broken slabs of baked mud are! And what a tale they have to tell. When I first read that tale I was instantly intrigued, because it contains explicit references to the existence of five antediluvian cities which, we are informed, were swallowed up by the waters of the Flood. 

The first thirty-seven lines of the University of Pennsylvania tablet are missing so we do not know how the story begins, but at the point where we enter it the Flood is still far in the future. 36 We hear about the creation of human beings, animals and plants. 37 Then another break of thirty-seven lines occurs after which we find that we have jumped forward in time to an epoch of high civilization. We learn that in this epoch, before the Flood, “kingship was lowered from heaven.” 38 

Then comes the reference to the foundation of Sumer’s antediluvian cities by an unnamed ruler or a god: 

After the lofty crown and the throne of kingship 

had been lowered from heaven, 

He perfected the rites and the exalted divine laws … 

Founded the five cities … in pure places, 

Called their names, apportioned them as cult centers. 

The first of these cities, Eridu … 

The second Badtibira … 

The third Larak … 

The fourth Sippar … 

The fifth Shuruppak …39 

“The preserver of the seed of mankind…” 

When we rejoin the narrative after a third thirty-seven-line lacuna, the scene has changed bewilderingly. Although the Flood is still in the future, the foundation of the five antediluvian cities is now far in the past. It is apparent from the context that in the intervening period the cities’ inhabitants have behaved in such a way as to incur divine displeasure and that a convocation of the gods has been called to punish mankind with the terrible instrument of an earth-destroying flood. At the moment where we pick up the story again, a few of the gods are dissenting from this decision and expressing their unhappiness and dissatisfaction with it. 40 

Without preamble, a man called Zisudra is then introduced—the Sumerian archetype of the Biblical patriarch Noah. The text describes him as “a pious, god-fearing king” 41 and allows us to understand that one of the gods has taken pity on him. The name of this god has not survived in the University of Pennsylvania tablet, but the Schøyen fragment gives us a clue when it reveals that Zisudra was not only a king but also a priest of the god Enki. 42 This god, of whom we will hear more later, tells Zisudra: 

Take my word, give ear to my instructions: A flood will sweep over the cult centers. To destroy the seed of mankind, Is the decision, the word of the assembly of gods. 43 

A text break of forty lines follows which scholars deduce, from the many later recensions of the same myth, “must have continued with detailed instructions to Zisudra to build a giant boat and thus save himself from destruction.” 44 

When the story resumes, the cataclysm has already begun: 

All the windstorms, exceedingly powerful, attacked as one, At the same time the flood swept over the cult centers. For seven days and seven nights the flood swept over the land, And the huge boat was tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters. 45 

Throughout the cataclysm the skies remain dark. Then, on the eighth day, the sun breaks through the clouds, and the rains and raging storms cease. Opening the “window” of his survival ship, Zisudra looks out over a world that has changed forever and sacrifices an ox and a sheep to the gods. 46 

An infuriating lacuna of thirty-nine lines follows, presumably telling us about the place where Zisudra makes landfall and the steps that he takes thereafter. When we pick up the story again, near the end of the text, we find him in the presence of the high gods of the Sumerian pantheon, Anu and Enlil, who have repented of their earlier decision to wipe mankind entirely from the face of the earth and are now so grateful to Zisudra for building his ark and surviving the Flood that they decide to make him immortal: 

Life like a god they gave him; Breath eternal like a god they brought down for him, … Zisudra the king, The preserver of the name of vegetation and of the seed of mankind. 47 

The final thirty-nine lines are missing. 48 

The Seven Sages 

The late Professor Samuel Noah Kramer, one of the great authorities on ancient Sumer, observed that there are “tantalizing obscurities and uncertainties” in this oldest surviving written version of the worldwide tradition of the Flood. 49 What there can be no doubt about at all, however, is that the tablet speaks of an urban civilization that existed before the Flood and provides us with the names of its sacred cities: Eridu, Bad Tibira, Larak, Sippar, Shuruppak. These cities, we are told quite specifically, were swallowed up in the deluge. Moreover, long after Sumer itself had ceased to exist, rich traditions concerning the five cities, the antediluvian epoch, and the Flood survived in Mesopotamia, and were repeated by the cultures of Akkad, Assyria and Babylon that later rose to prominence, almost down to Christian times. 50 Indeed it is fair to say that the traditional history of this region, as it was told in antiquity, is very clearly divided into two different periods—before and after the Flood—and that both periods were regarded by the peoples of the region as absolutely factual and real. 

We saw in Chapter One how the Mesopotamian traditions not only preserved memories of antediluvian cities, but also of an antediluvian civilizing hero called Oannes, and the brotherhood of Seven Sages, the “Seven Apkallu” who are said to have supported his civilizing mission. As the reader will recall, these sages are often depicted in the surviving art of the region as bearded men holding a peculiar kind of bag or bucket, but sometimes they are also shown as therianthropes, part bird and part human in form. As I dug deeper, going back and carefully rereading the accounts of the Babylonian priest Berossus that I had first touched upon when I was researching Fingerprints of the Gods, I was reminded that Oannes and the Apkallu sages were also sometimes depicted in a different therianthropic form, in this case part fish, part human. Each of them was paired as a “counselor” to an antediluvian King and they were renowned for their wisdom in affairs of state and for their skills as architects, builders and engineers. 51 

Berossos compiled his History from the temple archives of Babylon (reputed to have contained “public records” that had been preserved for “over 150,000 years” 52 ). He has passed on to us a description of Oannes as a “monster,” or a “creature.” However, what Berossos has to say is surely more suggestive of a man wearing some sort of fish-costume—in short, some sort of disguise. The monster, Berossos tells us: 

had the whole body of a fish, but underneath and attached to the head of the fish there was another head, human, and joined to the tail of the fish, feet like those of a man, and it had a human voice … At the end of the day, this monster, Oannes, went back to the sea and spent the night. It was amphibious, able to live both on land and in the sea … Later, other monsters similar to Oannes appeared. 53 

Bearing in mind that the curious containers carried by Oannes and the Apkallu sages are also depicted on one of the megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe (and, as we saw in Chapter One, as far afield as ancient Mexico as well), what are we to make of all this? 

The mystery deepens when we follow the Mesopotamian traditions further. In summary, Oannes and the brotherhood of Apkallu sages are depicted as tutoring mankind for many thousands of years. It is during this long passage of time that the five antediluvian cities arise, the centers of a great civilization, and that kingship is “lowered from heaven.” Prior to the first appearance of Oannes, Berossos says, the people of Mesopotamia “lived in a lawless manner, like the beasts of the field.” 54 

Berossos wrote his History some time between 290 and 278 BC, but only fragments of it have come down to us, preserved as quotations and summaries in the works of other writers such as Syncellus and Eusebius. However, scholars recognize that what has been transmitted to us in this way does accurately reflect much more ancient Mesopotamian traditions inscribed on cuneiform tablets going back to the very earliest times. 55 For example, the name Oannes, which has perhaps been distorted by the writers who passed it on to us, turns out to be derived from Uannadapa in cuneiform, often abbreviated simply to Adapa or to U-Anna—with the Adapa element originally being a title meaning (appropriately for a sage) “Wise.” 56 It is said in the ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions that U-Anna “accomplishes the plans of heaven and earth.” 57 Others of the group of antediluvian sages include U-Anne-dugga “who is endowed with comprehensive understanding” and An-Enlilda, described as “the conjurer of the city of Eridu.” 58

Figure 28: Oannes and the brotherhood of Apkallu sages.

This last point—that the seven antediluvian sages were “conjurers,” “sorcerers,” “warlocks,” “magicians”—is driven home repeatedly in the cuneiform texts. 59 But at the same time, associated with their magical abilities are obviously practical, technological or even scientific skills. 60 Thus they were masters of “the chemical recipes,” 61 they were medical doctors, 62 they were carpenters, stone cutters, metal workers and goldsmiths, 63 and they laid the foundations of cities. 64 Indeed, in later times, all crafts used in royal building and renovation projects were attributed to knowledge that had originated with the antediluvian sages. 65 As Amar Annus of the University of Tartu, Estonia, summarizes in a detailed study: 

The period before the deluge was the one of revelation in the Mesopotamian mythology, when the basis of all later knowledge was laid down. The antediluvian sages were culture-heroes, who brought the arts of civilization to the land. During the time that follows this period, nothing new is invented, the original revelation is only transmitted and unfolded. Oannes and other sages taught all foundations of civilization to antediluvian humankind. 66 

The cuneiform tablets of ancient Mesopotamia also shed at least some light on the containers that the Apkallu sages are so often depicted as holding. They are referred to as banduddu—“buckets,” 67 and are presumed to have held “holy water.” 68 Very often, too, as the reader will recall from Chapter One, the sage holds in his other hand a cone-like object. These are referred to in the inscriptions as mullilu —meaning “purifiers.” 69 In the same scenes the sages frequently appear in conjunction with a stylized tree or sometimes with the figure of a king, or sometimes both. No specific textual references to the tree have survived but the general assumption of scholars is that it must be a “sacred tree” while many believe it represents “the tree of life” 70 and that it symbolizes “both the divine world order and the king, who functioned as its earthly administrator.” 71 The conclusion, therefore, is that we are looking at “a magically protective rite, a benediction, an anointing”: 72 

By sprinkling the tree with holy water the sages imparted to it their own sanctity, upheld the cosmic harmony and thus ensured the correct functioning of the plans of heaven and earth. 73 

Figure 29: Enki, the Sumerian god of wisdom and magic whose special responsibility was the subterranean freshwater ocean known as the Abzu. Because of this connection with the Abzu he was often depicted with streams of water bearing fishes flowing from his shoulders. The Akkadians called him Ea. 

The Seven Apkallus were believed to have been created by Enki (Enki is his Sumerian name; the Akkadians called him Ea), revealed in the Schøyen tablet as Zisudra’s patron, the great god of the subterranean freshwater ocean known as the Abzu. 74 Enki’s particular attributes, in addition to his connection to this watery realm, were wisdom, magic, and the arts and crafts of civilization, 75 so it is appropriate that the sages would be among his creatures and that they would frequently be symbolized as fish. The form of the fish Apkallu, as one scholar notes: 

is linked with the secrets that dwell in the deep; and its never-closing, ever-watchful eyes lend it an omniscient sagacity. 76 

Thanks to the advice and teachings of these extraordinary sages, these magicians of the wisdom-god Enki, we learn from the cuneiform texts that human civilization achieved rapid technological and scientific advances and entered a phase of “exceptional splendor and plenty, the golden age before the flood.” 77 All seemed to be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. But as the millennia passed, mankind fell out of harmony with the universe and with the deities—and with one deity in particular, the great Enlil, described as “the King, supreme lord, father and creator,” and (perhaps giving more sense of his personality) as a “raging storm.” 78 Although the sky god Anu was technically ranked first in the Sumerian pantheon, he was usually a rather remote, impotent figure. Enlil was his second in command but in fact responsible for most “executive decisions.” Enki—nominated in some texts as Enlil’s younger brother—was ranked third. 79 

Figure 30: The powerful Sumerian deity Enlil  Often described as a “raging storm,” 

it was he who ordered the extermination of mankind by the agency of the Flood. 

The Sumerian flood story, as we have seen, has many gaps but other tablets, such as those containing the Epic of Gilgamesh, arguably the most famous of all surviving Mesopotamian texts, fill in the details and leave us in no doubt of Enlil’s role: 

In those days the world teemed, the people multiplied, the world bellowed like a wild bull, and the great god was aroused by the clamor. Enlil heard the clamor and he said to the gods in council, “The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel.” So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind. 80 

We know what happened next. The god Enki (in addition to the Schøyen tablet, other later texts also confirm it was he) intervened to warn Ziusudra that the instrument of extermination, a great, life destroying flood, was about to be unleashed. 81 Berossos, who calls Ziusudra “Xisouthros,” gives us the next chapter of the story: 

[Enki] appeared to Xisuthrus in a dream and revealed that … mankind would be destroyed by a great flood. He then ordered him to bury together all the tablets, the first, the middle and the last, and hide them in Sippar, the city of the sun. Then he was to build a boat and board it with his family and his best friends. He was to provision it with food and drink and also take on board wild animals and birds and all four-footed animals. Then, when all was prepared, he was to make ready to sail … He did not stop working until the ship was built. Its length was five stades [3,000 feet or 914 meters] and its breadth two stades [1,200 feet or 366 meters]. He boarded the finished ship, equipped for everything as he had been commanded, with his wife, children and closest friends …82 

The surviving fragments of Berossus do not tell us of the experience of the Flood, but the Epic of Gilgamesh does, putting the words into the mouth of Ziusudra/Xisouthros himself: 83 

For six days and nights the wind blew, torrent and tempest and flood overwhelmed the world, tempest and flood raged together like warring hosts. When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea grew calm, the flood was stilled. I looked at the face of the world and there was silence. The surface of the sea stretched as flat as a rooftop. All mankind had returned to clay … I opened a hatch and light fell on my face. Then I bowed low, I sat down and I wept, the tears streamed down my face, for on every side was a waste of water … Fourteen leagues distant there appeared a mountain, and there the boat grounded …84 

Berossos again: 

Then Xisuthrus knew that the earth had once again appeared … He disembarked, accompanied by his wife and daughter together with the steersman. He prostrated himself in worship of the earth and set up an altar and sacrificed to the gods. After this he disappeared together with those who had left the ship with him. Those who had remained on the ship and had not gone out with Xisuthrus … searched for him and called out for him by name all about. But Xisuthrus from then on was seen no more, and then the sound of a voice that came out of the air gave instruction that it was their duty to honor the gods and that Xisuthrus, because of the great honor he had shown the gods, had gone to the dwelling place of the gods and that his wife and daughter and the steersman had enjoyed the same honor. The voice then instructed them to return to … the city of Sippar, to dig up the tablets that were buried there and to turn them over to mankind. The place where they had come to rest was in the land of Armenia. 85 

So, in summary, both the Biblical and Mesopotamian accounts agree that Armenia was the place of refuge for the survivors of the Flood. Berossos, however, adds some important details missing from the Old Testament story. These are, first, the reference to Sippar, which, as we’ve seen, was one of the five antediluvian cities remembered in Sumerian traditions; secondly, the intriguing information that writings or archives from antediluvian times (“all the tablets, the first, the middle and the last”) were buried at Sippar before the Flood struck; and thirdly that the survivors were to return to Sippar when the waters had receded in order to dig up the buried tablets and “turn them over to mankind.” 

Figure 31: The Sumerian Flood survivor and the Ark: 

“The surface of the sea stretched as flat as a rooftop. 

All mankind had returned to clay … Fourteen leagues distant there 

appeared a mountain, and there the boat grounded.” 

What is envisaged here, therefore, is nothing less than a renewal of civilization after a global cataclysm—a renewal in which antediluvian knowledge was to be recovered and re promulgated. The Seven Sages, however, would no longer have any part to play in the spread of that knowledge. The cuneiform texts tell us that they had been sent back to the depths of the Abzu at the time of the Flood and ordered never to return. 86 Other sages “of human descent”—though in one case described as being “two-thirds Apkallu” 87—would take their place, some continuity would be maintained and civilization would rise again. In due course, later kings would speak of their link to the antediluvian world. In the late first millennium BC, Nebuchadnezzar I of Babylon described himself as a “seed preserved from before the flood” 88 while Ashurbanipal, who ruled the central Mesopotamian empire of Assyria in the seventh century BC, boasted: “I learned the craft of Adapa, the sage, which is the secret knowledge … I am well acquainted with the signs of heaven and earth … I am enjoying the writings on stones from before the flood.” 89 

It is a curious mystery, as we shall see in the next chapter, that the exact same notions of the Seven Sages as the bringers of civilization in the remotest antiquity, and of the preservation and repromulgation of “writings on stones from before the flood,” turn up in the supposedly completely distinct and unrelated culture of Ancient Egypt.

next

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resurrection

island of the Ka

notes

Chapter 7 

1. The late Professor Cesar Emiliani of Miami University, a winner of the Vega Medal from Sweden and the Agassiz medal from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, whose studies focused extensively on sea level rise, did put a figure on it: “As a result of the flood that formed the Scabland, the sea level rose very rapidly from minus 100 meters to minus 80 meters. By 12,000 years ago more than fifty percent of the ice had returned to the ocean, and the sea level had risen to minus 60 meters.” The references to minus 100 meters, minus 80 meters and minus 60 meters are by comparison with today’s sea level. So, before the flood that formed the Scabland of the Columbia Plateau, sea level was 100 meters lower than it is today, after the flood it was 60 meters lower than it is today, i.e. a staggering rise of 40 meters or 131 feet. See Cesare Emiliani, Planet Earth: Cosmology, Geology and the Evolution of Life and Environment, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 543. 

2. Ted E. Bunch, Richard B. Firestone, Allen West, James P. Kennett et al, “Very high temperature impact melt products as evidence for cosmic airbursts and impacts 12,900 years ago,” PNAS, June 2012, Vol. 109, No. 28, op. cit., pp. E1903, 1909–10 and 1912. See also Kinzie et al, “Nanodiamond-Rich Layer across Three Continents Consistent With Major Cosmic Impact 12,800 years ago,” The Journal of Geology, Vol. 122, No. 5 (September 2014) op. cit., p. 476 and Appendix B “Site descriptions and dating.” 

3. Ted E. Bunch, Richard B. Firestone, Allen West, James P. Kennett et al, “Very high temperature impact melt products” op. cit., p. E1912. 

4. Encyclopedia Iranica, “Zoroaster ii. General Survey,” http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/zoroaster-ii-general-survey. 

5. Ibid. 

6. Ibid. 

7. Ibid. 

8. R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1961, e.g. see page 135: “The whole story of Yima’s golden age, his excavation of the Vara, or underground retreat, and his re-emergence to re-people the earth (the last episode occurs only in the Pahlavi books) must belong to a very old stratum of Iranian folklore wholly untouched by the teachings of Zoroaster.” 

9. J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., The Zend Avesta, reprint edition by Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 1990, Part I, p. 5. 

10. Ibid., p. 11. 

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid., p. 13. 

13. Ibid. 

14. Reported by Frank Brown and John Fleagle in Nature, 17 February 2005. And see Scientific American, 17 Feb 2005, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fossil-reanalysis-pushes/. 

15. A golden age in which “fields would bear plenty of grass for cattle: now with floods that stream, with snows that melt, it willseem a happy land in the world…” J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., The Zend Avesta, op. cit., p. 16. See also the following passage from the Yasna, cited in R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, op. cit., pp. 92–3: “Kingly Yima, of goodly pastures, the most glorious of all men born on earth, like the sun to behold among men, for during his reign he made beasts and men imperishable, he brought it about that the waters and plants never dried up, and that there should be an inexhaustible stock of food to eat. In the reign of Yima the valiant there was neither heat nor cold, neither old age, nor death, nor disease…” “Yima’s golden reign, in which all men were immortal and enjoyed perpetual youth, lasted a full thousand years.” 

16. J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., The Zend Avesta, op. cit., pp. 15–18. 

17. E.W. West, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, Part I, Reprint Edition, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 1990, p. 17. 

18. J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., The Zend Avesta, op. cit., p. 5. 

19. Cited in Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, reprint edition by Arktos Media, 2011, p. 254. 

20. E.W. West, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, op. cit., p. 17, note 5. 

21. J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., The Zend Avesta, op. cit., p. 18. 

22. Ibid. 

23. Ibid., p. 20. See also the US (1898) edition of Darmetester’s translation of the Vendidad, reprinted 1995, edited by Joseph H. Peterson, p. 14, note 87. 

24. R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, op. cit., p. 135. 

25. J. Darmetester and H.L. Mills, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., The Zend Avesta, op. cit., p. 17. 

26. Ibid. 

27. Ibid., p. 20. 

28. Ibid., note 5. 

29. Ibid., note 4. 

30. Encyclopedia Iranica, op. cit. “Jamshid i” (http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamsid-i) and “Jamshid ii” (http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jamsid-ii). 

31. E.W. West, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, op. cit., p. 26. 

32. Delia Goetz, Sylvanus G. Morley, Adrian Reconis, Trans., Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiche Maya, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, p. 178. 

33. Ibid., p. 93. 

34. John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America, Quill/William Morrow, New York, 1990, p. 41. 

35. J. Eric Thompson, Maya History and Religion, University of Oklahoma Press, 1990, p. 333. 

36. Genesis 6: 19–20. 

37. Genesis 6: 16. 

38. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1988, Vol. I, p. 162. 

39. Ibid. 

40. Omer Demir, Cappadocia: Cradle of History, 12th Revised Edition, p. 70. 

41. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_%28underground_city%29. 

42. Hurriyet Daily News, 28 December 2014 (http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/massive-ancient-underground-city-discovered-inturkeys-nevsehir-aspx?PageID=238&NID=76196&NewsCatID=375), The Independent, 31 December 2014 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/vast-5000-yearold-underground-city-discovered-in-turkeys-cappadociaregion-9951911.html). 

43. E.g. see report in The Independent, 31 December 2014, op. cit. 

44. Turkey, Lonely Planet, 2013, p. 478. 

45. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derinkuyu_%28underground_city%29. 

46. Omer Demir, Cappadocia: Cradle of History, 9th Revised Edition, p. 61. 

47. For example in Proto-Hittite times up to 2,000 years earlier. See Omer Demir, op. cit., p. 70. 

48. Ibid., p. 60. 

49. Ibid. 

50. Ibid., p. 59. 

51. Ibid., p. 61. 

52. R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, op. cit., p. 135. 

Chapter 8 

1. Genesis 6: 7. 

2. Genesis 6: 8–21. 

3. Genesis 6: 19–20. 

4. Genesis 8: 3. 

5. Genesis 8: 4. 

6. Genesis 8: 13–17.

7. Genesis 8: 20–1. 

8. Genesis 9: 1–7. 

9. For example see Jeremiah 51: 27; also Isaiah 37: 38; 2 Kings 19: 37. 

10. Armen Asher and Teryl Minasian Asher, The Peoples of Ararat, Booksurge, 2009, p. 241. 

11. Charles Burney and David Marshall Lang, The Peoples of the Hills: Ancient Ararat and the Caucasus, Phoenix Press, London, 1971, p. 127. See also Amelie Kurht, The Ancient Near East, Routledge, London and New York, 1995, Vol. II, p. 550: “Archaeologically, the second millenium of the region is something of a blank at present.” 

12. Ibid., p.17. 

13. Armen Asher and Teryl Minasian Asher, The Peoples of Ararat, op. cit. 

14. Moses Khorenatsi, History of the Armenians, Caravan Books, Ann Arbor, 2006, pp. 72 and 82ff. Haik, also spelled Hayk, is said to be the son of Torgomah [T’orgom], who was the son of Tiras [T’iras], who was the son of Gomer [Gamer], who was the son of Noah’s son Japheth [Yapeth]. 

15. Arra S. Avakian and Ara John Movsesian, Armenia: A Journey Through History, The Electric Press, California, 1998–2008, p. 47. See also Armen Asher and Teryl Minasian Asher, The Peoples of Ararat, op. cit., p. 284–5. 

16. http://www.armenian-genocide.org/genocidefaq.html. 

17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahoFlLh2Y3E. 

18. https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=ahoFlLh2Y3E. 

19. The quotation is from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, 1951. 

20. This was the flood that formed the channeled scablands of the Columbia Plateau. Cesare Emiliani, Planet Earth: Cosmology, Geology and the Evolution of Life and Environment, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 543, researched the extent of the sea level rise involved: “As a result of the flood that formed the Scabland, the sea level rose very rapidly from minus 100 meters to minus 80 meters. By 12,000 years ago more than fifty percent of the ice had returned to the ocean, and the sea level had risen to minus 60 meters.” The references to minus 100 meters, minus 80 meters and minus 60 meters are by comparison with today’s sea level. So, before the flood that formed the scablands, sea level was 100 meters lower than it is today, after the flood it was 60 meters lower than it is today, i.e. a staggering rise of 40 meters or 131 feet. 

21. Cesare Emiliani held a PhD from the University of Chicago where he pioneered the isotopic analysis of deep-sea sediments as a way to study the Earth’s past climates. He then moved to the University of Miami where he continued his isotopic studies and led several expeditions at sea. He was the recipient of the Vega Medal from Sweden and the Agassiz medal from the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. 

22. Emiliani, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 41 (1978), p. 159, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam. 

23. E.g. see Karl W. Luckert, Stone Age Religion at Göbekli Tepe, Triplehood, 2013, p. 101. 

24. Joris Peters and Klaus Schmidt, “Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey: a preliminary assessment,” Anthropozoologica, 2004, 39 (1), pp. 204–5. 25. Karl W. Luckert, Stone Age Religion at Göbekli Tepe, op. cit., pp. 100–2. 

26. Genesis 9: 1. 

27. Joris Peters and Klaus Schmidt, “Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe,” op. cit., pp. 206–8. 

28. Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character, The University Press of Chicago, 1963, p. 33. 

29. http://www.penn.museum/collections/object/97591. 

30. http://www.schoyencollection.com/literature-collection/sumerian-literature-collection/sumerian-flood-story-ms.-3026. 

31. Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, p. 148ff. 

32. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, op. cit., p. 148. 

33. http://www.penn.museum/collections/object/97591. 

34. http://www.schoyencollection.com/literature-collection/sumerian-literature-collection/sumerian-flood-story-ms.-3026. 

35. Ibid., and see Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2014, p. 91. 

36. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, op. cit., p. 149. 

37. Ibid., p. 149. 

38. Ibid.; William Hallow, Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol. 23, 61, 1970. 

39. Cited in Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, op. cit., pp. 149–51. 

40. Ibid., p. 151. 

41. Ibid. 

42. http://www.schoyencollection.com/literature-collection/sumerian-literature-collection/sumerian-flood-story-ms.-3026. And again see Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah, op. cit., p. 91. 

43. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, op. cit., p. 151. 

44. Ibid., p. 152. 

45. Ibid. 

46. Ibid. 

47. Ibid., pp. 152–3. 

48. Ibid., p. 153. 

49. Ibid., p. 148. 

50. See discussion in Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (Eds.), Berossos and Manetho, University of Michigan Press, 1999, p. 15ff. 

51. Benno Lansberger, “Three Essays on the Sumerians II: The Beginnings of Civilization in Mesopotamia,” in Benno Lansberger, Three Essays on the Sumerians, Udena Publications, Los Angeles, p. 174; Berossos and Manetho, op. cit., pp. 17, 44; Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, op. cit., pp. 182–3, 328; Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, British Museum Press, London, 1992, pp. 41, 82–83, 163–4. 

52. Berossos and Manetho, op. cit., p. 43. 

53. Ibid., p. 44. 

54. George Smith, with A.H. Sayce, The Chaldean Account of the Genesis, Sampson Low, London, 1880, p. 33. 

55. Berossos and Manetho, op. cit., pp. 26 and 34. See also George Smith, with A.H. Sayce, The Chaldean Account of the Genesis, op. cit p. 32. 

56. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions,” Journal of the Study of Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 19.4 (2010), p. 285. 

57. Ibid. 

58. Ibid. 

59. Ibid., e.g. pp. 282, 290, 297, 301, 306. See also Jonas C. Greenfield, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Prov 9:1): A Mistranslation,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 76, No. 1, Essays in Memory of Moshe Held (Jul., 1985), p. 16.

60. Ibid., p. 281: “Many kinds of Mesopotamian sciences and technologies were ideologically conceived as originating with antediluvian apkallus.” 

61. Erica Reiner, “The Etiological Myth of the Seven Sages,” Orientalia NS 30 (1961), p. 10. 

62. Jonas C. Greenfield, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” op. cit., p. 15. 

63. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 289. 

64. Jonas C. Greenfield, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” op. cit., p. 16. 

65. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 289. 

66. Ibid., p. 283; see also: W.G. Lambert, “Ancestors, Authors and Canonicity,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1957, pp. 8–9: “The sum of revealed knowledge was given once and for all by the antediluvian sages.” 

67. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, op. cit., p. 46. 

68. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 293. 

69. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, op. cit., p. 46. 

70. Ibid., p. 170. 

71. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 293. 

72. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, op. cit., p. 171. 

73. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 293. 

74. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “The Mesopotamian Counterparts of the Biblical Nephilim,” in E.W. Conrad and E.G. Newing (Eds.), Perspectives on Language and Text: Essays and Poems in Honor of Francis I. Andersen’s Sixtieth Birthday, July 28, 1985, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, IN, p. 41. For Enki/Ea and the Abzu see Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, op. cit., pp. 75 and 27: “It was anciently believed that the springs, wells, streams, rivers and lakes drew their water from and were replenished from a freshwater ocean which lay beneath the earth in the abzu (apsu) … The salt sea, on the other hand, surrounded the earth. The abzu was the particular realm and home of the wise god Enki … Enki was thought to have occupied the abzu since before the creation of mankind. According to the Babylonian Epic of Creation, Apsu was the name of a primal creature, the lover of Tiamat, and when Ea killed Apsu he set up his home on the dead creature’s body, whose name was henceforth transferred to Ea’s residence…” 

75. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, op. cit., p. 75. 

76. S. Denning-Bolle, cites in Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 314. 

77. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 287. 

78. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green (Eds.), Gods, Demons and Symbols of Mesopotamia, op. cit., p. 76. 

79. Ibid., pp. 76 and 75:see also Gwendolyn Leick, A Dictionary of Near Eastern Mythology, Routledge, London and New York, 1998, pp. 4–6.

80. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Classics, London, 1988, p. 108. 

81. E.g. see Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, op. cit., p. 84. 

82. Berossos and Manetho, op. cit., pp. 49–50. NB. In this fragment Berossos, preserved by Syncellus, Enki is rendered as “Kronos.” The translators explain in footnote 17 that: “Kronos was the father of Zeus, as Enki was the father of Marduk. Berossos or Syncellus here has used the Greek equivalent for the Babylonian god.” 

83. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the flood survivor, though manifestly the same figure as Ziusudra/Xithoutros, is known by the name of Utnapishtim. As Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum, explains: “The name Ziusudra is very suitable for an immortal flood hero, since in Sumerian it means something like He-of-Long-Life. The name of the corresponding flood hero in the Gilgamesh epic is Utnapishtim, of roughly similar meaning. In fact, we are not sure whether the Babylonian name is a translation of the Sumerian or vice versa.” Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah, op. cit., p. 92. 

84. The Epic of Gilgamesh, op. cit., p. 111.

85. Berossos and Manetho, op. cit., p. 50. 

86. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 282; Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “The Mesopotamian Counterparts of the Biblical Nephilim,” op. cit., p. 43. 

87. Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “The Mesopotamian Counterparts of the Biblical Nephilim,” op. cit., pp. 39–40. 

88. Amar Annus, “On the Origin of the Watchers,” op. cit., p. 295. 

89. Jeanette C. Fincke, “The Babylonian Texts of Nineveh: Report on the British Museum’s Library Project,” Archiv fur Orientforschung 50 (2003/2004), p. 111.

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