ALL ROADS LEAD TO SUMER

>>The world’s deepest secrets all lead back to Sumer in Mesopotamia, the first known great civilization, located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers at the headwaters of the Persian Gulf. In biblical times, it was called Chaldea or Shinar. Today, it is known as Iraq.

The Sumerian culture seemed to appear from nowhere more than six thousand years ago, and, before it strangely vanished, it had greatly influenced life as far east as the Indus River, which flows from the Himalayas through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, and as far west as the Nile of the later Egyptian kingdoms.

About 2400 B.C. Sumer was invaded from the west and north by Semitic tribes and by about 2350 B.C. was captive to the warrior leader Sargon the Great, who founded the Semite Akkadian dynasty which stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. After years of further wars and population displacements, the lands of Sumer were united under Hammurabi of Babylon, whose famous “Code” of laws may have been instituted to discipline the mass migrations of people in the wake of catastrophes at the time.

Alan Alford noted that the devastating eruption of the Greek island of Santorini and mysterious destruction on Crete as well as at MohenjoDaro, capital of an Indus Valley culture, took place about the time of Hammurabi’s rule. Alford saw a connection between these events and the removal of the Easter Island population, the emergence of Andean civilizations, and the arrival of the Mayas in Central America—all of which occurred about the same time. It is also now clear that the Code of Hammurabi was drawn from laws set down by the Sumerians centuries earlier, particularly the earliest law code yet discovered, issued by the Sumerian king UrNammu.

Virtually nothing was known about the Sumerians until about 150 years ago when archeologists, spurred on by the writings of Italian traveler Pietro della Valle in the early seventeenth century, began to dig into the strange mounds dotting the countryside in southern Iraq.

Beginning with the discovery of Sargon II’s palace near modern-day Khorsabad by the Frenchman Paul Emile Botta in 1843, archeologists found buried cities, broken palaces, artifacts, and thousands of clay tablets detailing every facet of Sumerian life. By the late nineteenth century, Sumerian had been recognized as an original language and was being translated. Despite today’s knowledge, the general public still has been taught little about this first great human civilization that suddenly materialized in Mesopotamia.

It is fascinating to realize that it may be possible to know more about this six-thousand-year-oid civilization than we may ever know about the more recent Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The explanation lies in the Sumerian cuneiform writing. Whereas the papyrus of other elder empires disintegrated over time or were destroyed by the fires of war, cuneiform was etched onto wet clay tablets with a stylus, creating a wedge-shaped script. These tablets were then dried, baked, and kept in large libraries. About five hundred thousand of these clay tablets have now been found and have provided modern researchers with invaluable knowledge of the Sumerians.

The Sumerian tablets went largely undeciphered until a German high school teacher named George Grotefend began the systematic translation of cuneiform in 1802. Today many tablets still have not yet been translated into English because the sheer quantity has overwhelmed the world’s handful of translators.

It must be understood that the Sumerian alphabet was essentially shorthand for a much older original language made up of logograms (symbols representing concepts rather than words) resembling nothing less than antique Chinese characters. Since it was not a detailed language like English, there has been wide latitude in its translation. When these translations began in the nineteenth century, the symbol for the Sumerian’s creators was simply thought to mean mythical “gods” and everything proceeded from that point.

Archeological studies have shown that shortly after 4000 B.C. within the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, marshes had been drained, canals dug, dams and dikes constructed, a large-scale irrigation system initiated, and large, gleaming cities built.

The first twelve major city-states—with exotic names like Ur, Nippur, Uruk, Lagash, Akkad, and Kish—were all centered around towering, stair-stepped temples called ziggurats (Holy Mountains] and each was ruled by its own “god,” called an ensi. Spiraling outward from the ziggurat were public buildings, markets, and homes. Surrounding each city were large tracts of land also controlled by the local ensi. As these city-states developed, they came under the leadership of a king, called a lugal, who answered to the local “god.”

Despite our superficial knowledge of the Sumerians, we have already been able to credit them with many world “firsts.” Professor Samuel Noah Kramer, author of History Begins at Sumer and The Sumerians, noted that these people developed the first writing system (cuneiform), the wheel, schools, medical science, the first written proverbs, history, the first bicameral congress, taxation, laws, social reforms, the first cosmogony and cosmology, and the first coined money (a weighed silver shekel). Many of the records left to us are of mundane daily affairs such as tax records, court hearings, and market quotations. In fact, these ancient people were little different than today’s societies. They laughed, loved and hated, squabbled and conspired, plotted against one another and eventually fought each other.

Author Tomas described the bust of the Sumerian queen Shubad, on display in the British Museum: “The lovely young lady wears an amazingly modern wig, large earrings, and necklace. The sophisticated girl, who used cosmetics, a wig, and expensive jewelry, died in a ritual suicide in 2900 B.C.—2,150 years before the foundation of Rome and 2,000 years before Moses starred his writings.”

Sumerians traveled frequently and widely and are thought to have brought their advanced technology of shipbuilding and mapping to the early Phoenicians, who settled along the eastern Mediterranean coast in what is now Lebanon.

Their knowledge of the heavens was both amazing and puzzling. “The whole concept of spherical astronomy, including the 360-degree circle, the zenith, the horizon, the celestial axis, the poles, the ecliptic, the equinoxes, etc., all arose suddenly in Sumer,” noted Alford. Sumerian knowledge of the movements of the sun and moon resulted in the world’s first calendar, used for centuries afterward by the Semites, Egyptians, and Greeks.

As Alford pointed out, few people realize that we owe not only our geometry but also our modern timekeeping systems to the Sumerian base-sixty mathematical system. “The origin of 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute is not arbitrary, but designed around a sexagesimal [based on the number 60] system,” Alford reported, adding that the modern zodiac was a Sumerian creation based on their twelve gods. They used it to chart a great processional Cycle, dividing the 360degree view from the Earth’s North Pole during its twelve-month orbit around the sun into twelve equal parts—or houses—of 30 degrees each. Taking into account the slight wobble in Earth’s orbit, movement through this complete cycle takes 25,920 years, an event known as the Platonian Year, named for the Greek scholar Plato who inspired the Knights Templar, Illuminati, and Rhodes’s Round Tables.

“The uncomfortable question which the scientists have avoided is this: how could the Sumerians, whose civilization only lasted 2,000 years, possibly have observed and recorded a celestial cycle that took 25,920 years to complete? And why did their civilization begin in the middle of a zodiac period? Is this a clue that their astronomy was a legacy from the gods?” asked Alford.

His question could be enlarged to ask how did the early primitive humans of almost six thousand years ago suddenly transform from small packs of hunter-gatherers into a full-blown—advanced even by today’s standards—civilization? Even the writers of The New Encyclopaedia Britannica acknowledged that serious questions remain concerning the Sumerian histories and cautiously explained that such queries “are posed from the standpoint of 20th century civilization and are in part colored by ethical overtones, so that answers can only be relative.”

Since we now have thousands of translated Sumerian tablets along with their inscribed cylinder seals, perhaps we should allow the Sumerians themselves to explain.

The answer is that they claimed everything they achieved came from their gods.

“All the ancient peoples believed in gods who had descended to Earth from the heavens and who could at will soar heavenwards,” explained Middle Eastern scholar Zecharia Sitchin in the prologue to the first book of a series detailing his translations and interpretations of Sumerian accounts of their origin and history. “But these tales were never giver credibility, having been branded by scholars from the very beginning as myths.”

Recognizing that even the most learned researcher before the turn of the twentieth century could not possibly have begun to think in terms of concepts we accept as commonplace today, Sitchin reasoned, “Now that astronauts have landed on the Moon, and unmanned spacecraft explore other planets, it is no longer impossible to believe that a civilization on another planet more advanced than ours was capable of landing its astronauts on the planet Earth some time in the past.”

It is significant to learn that the Sumerians never considered, or referred to, the beings who brought them knowledge as “gods.” This was a later interpretation by the Romans and Greeks, who fashioned their own “gods” after the earlier oral traditions.

The Sumerians called them the Anunnaki or Those Who Came to Earth from Heaven. <<

from, Rule By Secrecy, by Jim Marrs.

 

also see,  https://digitalseance.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/gurdjieff-on-sumeria/