Harte
Senior Member
The Annunaki, Reptilian shape-shifters from Nibiru
All,
Many people out there (and some here) endeavor to believe that all is not what it seems. This is to be applauded, in my opinion, since from such folks new discoveries flow. However, the need to believe in something greater than one's self can lead down a very dangerous road (Spanish Inquisition anyone?) Some folks are so easily led (or misled) that they in fact do exactly the opposite of what one might expect. That is, you wouldn't think that someone that believes that "all is not what it seems" would take statements about reality at face value. But this is exactly what these souls do in the case of Zecharia Sitchen and his interpretation of Sumerian Mythology as found on ancient cuneiform tablets.
For those of you that don't know about this, Sitchen came up with a theory in (I believe) 1976 that humans were the result of genetic manipulation of female apes about half a million years ago by aliens from a "tenth planet" (Niburu) that orbits our sun every 3600 years or so. His theory is based on his interpretation of certain cuneiform tablets originating in Mesopotamia that record the mythos of the Sumerian civilization.
The Sumerians believed, like so many other early religions, that their gods came from the sky. The fact that so many religions begin from this point has been fodder for an enormous number of outrageous wallet-emptying pseudo-historical tomes. Unfortunately, the God of Abraham didn't exactly make this claim, and is therefore not as legitimate as others, apparently. Anyway, the Sumerian gods were called the Annunaki and, in a manner similar to the Greek and Norse Gods, their exploits are (or were) legend, at least among the Sumerians. There are many writings about these gods, of course, along with many other more mundane surviving cuneiform scripts. These include receipts, accounting records, letters, signs and all the other minutia of everyday life. The followers of Sitchen, in responding to his critics, often claim that the dispute is merely one of translation. What they don't say, and Sitchen never tells you, is that the Sumerians actually left dictionaries behind, so the meanings of their words should be absolutely clear and unambiguous. These are not translation dictionaries, of course, but as in any dictionary, when a word is defined that particular word is not used in the definition. This leads to as clear an understanding of cuneiform words as can be expected, and agreement on the meaning of Akkadian and Sumerian words is enjoyed by practically every scholar that looks into these things, with the exception of Sitchen.
The Annunaki, as Sitchen says, were from another planet, though the Sumerians didn't know what we today know of the solar system. No, according to Sitchen, the Sumerians knew more than we do, owing to their contacts with the Annunaki. Sitchen bases this incredible idea on a design found on one single seal, which according to Sitchen, showed the sun surrounded by the nine planets, as well as the tenth planet Niburu, home of the Annunaki. I must note here that the evidence about this seal presented by Sitchen in his introductory work "Twelfth Planet" consisted of a hand drawn diagram (drawn by Sitchen, of course) that was supposed to be an accurate depiction of what was found on the seal. It turned out that Sitchen had changed a few things from the original in his copy, and every change tended to support his theory, however only incrementally. I'll forgive Sitchen for this, he is not an artist and the correlation of his errors with support for his theory could have been entirely accidental . Michael S. Heiser, a recognized expert in the field of Akkadian and Sumerian languages and art has another opinion of this seal:
(The above is from : http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/sitchinerrors.htm - VA243 )
Anyway, now to the meat of the matter. There have been hundreds of scholars study all these Sumerian tablets, but none have come up with Sitchen?s interpretation. Here are a few quotes from others about this anomalous fact:
And here?s a little more on the solar-system-depicting seal mentioned in this previous quote, and mentioned earlier in my statements:
http://www.lauralee.com/vanflan.htm
There are many, many websites out there of Sitchen debunkers, and all of them are perfectly believable and rational in their explanation of where Sitchen is wrong and how that leads to the complete refutation of his theory. Most of the debunkers are not angry at Sitchen (yet), nor are they rabid anti-catastophists (for you Bubbu). The majority are men of letters that are tired of being asked about these silly theories and have decided to post responses on the internet to direct the questioners to. On the other hand, there are about a million pro-Sitchen sites out there, and almost every one is rabidly anti science and anti Sitchen-debunkers. For an example of where the illogic of Sitchen has led, all you need to do is run a Google search on the following string : Annunaki reptile draco bloodline Niburu. Let me know if you find anything resembling rational thought.
Finally, I would suggest that the reader take a good look at the websites I have linked to here. There is a lot of info on some of these sites that I will not go into here. In particular, there are reams of writings about Sitchens inability to properly translate cuneiform tablets on the Sitchen is Wrong website http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/. Several PDF files are there as well as tons of info on the Akkadian and Sumerian Mythology, for those that are truly interested. I cannot post everything here (at least not in one post) because 1) my computer is old and feeble, and 2) my ISP is rickety and cheap.
Any comments about this posting I will certainly try to reply to, as I have a mountain of reference sites saved that pertain to Sitchen and his hangers-on.
Harte
All,
Many people out there (and some here) endeavor to believe that all is not what it seems. This is to be applauded, in my opinion, since from such folks new discoveries flow. However, the need to believe in something greater than one's self can lead down a very dangerous road (Spanish Inquisition anyone?) Some folks are so easily led (or misled) that they in fact do exactly the opposite of what one might expect. That is, you wouldn't think that someone that believes that "all is not what it seems" would take statements about reality at face value. But this is exactly what these souls do in the case of Zecharia Sitchen and his interpretation of Sumerian Mythology as found on ancient cuneiform tablets.
For those of you that don't know about this, Sitchen came up with a theory in (I believe) 1976 that humans were the result of genetic manipulation of female apes about half a million years ago by aliens from a "tenth planet" (Niburu) that orbits our sun every 3600 years or so. His theory is based on his interpretation of certain cuneiform tablets originating in Mesopotamia that record the mythos of the Sumerian civilization.
The Sumerians believed, like so many other early religions, that their gods came from the sky. The fact that so many religions begin from this point has been fodder for an enormous number of outrageous wallet-emptying pseudo-historical tomes. Unfortunately, the God of Abraham didn't exactly make this claim, and is therefore not as legitimate as others, apparently. Anyway, the Sumerian gods were called the Annunaki and, in a manner similar to the Greek and Norse Gods, their exploits are (or were) legend, at least among the Sumerians. There are many writings about these gods, of course, along with many other more mundane surviving cuneiform scripts. These include receipts, accounting records, letters, signs and all the other minutia of everyday life. The followers of Sitchen, in responding to his critics, often claim that the dispute is merely one of translation. What they don't say, and Sitchen never tells you, is that the Sumerians actually left dictionaries behind, so the meanings of their words should be absolutely clear and unambiguous. These are not translation dictionaries, of course, but as in any dictionary, when a word is defined that particular word is not used in the definition. This leads to as clear an understanding of cuneiform words as can be expected, and agreement on the meaning of Akkadian and Sumerian words is enjoyed by practically every scholar that looks into these things, with the exception of Sitchen.
The Annunaki, as Sitchen says, were from another planet, though the Sumerians didn't know what we today know of the solar system. No, according to Sitchen, the Sumerians knew more than we do, owing to their contacts with the Annunaki. Sitchen bases this incredible idea on a design found on one single seal, which according to Sitchen, showed the sun surrounded by the nine planets, as well as the tenth planet Niburu, home of the Annunaki. I must note here that the evidence about this seal presented by Sitchen in his introductory work "Twelfth Planet" consisted of a hand drawn diagram (drawn by Sitchen, of course) that was supposed to be an accurate depiction of what was found on the seal. It turned out that Sitchen had changed a few things from the original in his copy, and every change tended to support his theory, however only incrementally. I'll forgive Sitchen for this, he is not an artist and the correlation of his errors with support for his theory could have been entirely accidental . Michael S. Heiser, a recognized expert in the field of Akkadian and Sumerian languages and art has another opinion of this seal:
the \"sun\" symbol on this seal (which is essential to allegedly depicting the solar system) is not the sun. The actual sun symbol used on literally hundreds of seals, monuments, and other artwork from Sumer and Mesopotamia is shown to the reader via photos and compared to the symbol on this seal. It's not even close. I include examples where Sitchin's symbol occurs side-by-side with the real sun symbol so there can be no mistaking the fact that the Sumerians and Mesopotamians did in fact distinguish these symbols. This analysis erodes the entire foundation of Sitchin's 12 planet hypothesis.
(The above is from : http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/sitchinerrors.htm - VA243 )
Anyway, now to the meat of the matter. There have been hundreds of scholars study all these Sumerian tablets, but none have come up with Sitchen?s interpretation. Here are a few quotes from others about this anomalous fact:
Michael S. Heiser again, from http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/sitchinerrors.htm - VA243The reader must realize that the substance of my disagreement is not due to \"translation philosophy,\" as though Mr. Sitchin and I merely disagree over possible translations of certain words. What is at stake is the integrity of the cuneiform tablets themselves, along with the legacy of Sumer and Mesopotamian scribes. Very simply, the ancient Mesopotamians compiled their own dictionaries - we have them and they have been published since mid-century. The words Mr. Sitchin tells us refer to rocket ships have no such meanings according to the ancient Mesopotamians themselves. Likewise when Mr. Sitchin draws connections between Sumero-Mesopotamian gods and stories that simply do not exist in the literature (like insisting the Sumerians believed there were twelve planets and having the Anunnaki living on Nibiru, the supposed 12th planet), my argument with him is one that opposes such fabrications, not just one how words are translated. To persist in embracing Mr. Sitchin's views on this matter (and a host of others) amounts to rejecting the legacy of the ancient Sumerian and Akkadian scribes whose labors have come down to us from the ages. Put bluntly, is it more coherent to believe a Mesopotamian scribe's definition of a word, or Mr. Sitchin's?
I do believe that Mr. Sitchin has done some kind of work in the ancient languages (I have never seen academic credentials in the form of degrees or transcripts), but some of the mistakes he makes are at so basic a level of language knowledge that I sincerely doubt he knows ANY of the ancient languages he says he does. I'm guessing that with Hebrew, for example, Mr. Sitchin (being Jewish) can sight-read the language but doesn't understand ancient Biblical Hebrew grammar (much like many English readers don't have a real grasp of the mechanics of English grammar). I have seen little that convinces me that Mr. Sitchin knows any ancient languages, much less demonstrating that he is a language "expert". I say this because of Mr. Sitchin's linguistic mistakes (see below), and because he rarely interacts with scholarly articles pertaining to any linguistic material in the texts he uses. Unfortunately, there are even points he just makes up.
Robert Todd Carroll, ?The Skeptic?s Dictionary? http://skepdic.com/sitchin.htmlNo other scientist has discovered that these descendents of gods blew themselves up with nuclear weapons some 4,000 years ago. Sitchin alone can look at a Sumerian tablet and see that it depicts a man being subjected to radiation. He alone knows how to correctly translate ancient terms allowing him to discover such things as that the ancients made rockets. Yet, he doesn't seem to know that the seasons are caused by the earth's tilt, not by its distance from the sun.
Sitchin was born in Russia, was raised in Palestine, and graduated from the University of London with a degree in economic history. He worked for years as a journalist and editor in Israel before settling in New York.
Sitchin, like Velikovsky, presents himself as erudite and scholarly in a number of books, including The Twelfth Planet (1976) and The Cosmic Code (1998). Both Sitchin and Velikovsky write very knowledgeably of ancient myths and both are nearly scientifically illiterate. Like von D?niken and Velikovsky, Sitchin weaves a compelling and entertaining story out of facts, misrepresentations, fictions, speculations, misquotes, and mistranslations. Each begins with their beliefs about ancient visitors from other worlds and then proceeds to fit facts and fictions to their basic hypotheses. Each is a master at ignoring inconvenient facts, making mysteries where there were none before, and offering their alien hypotheses to solve the mysteries. Their works are very attractive to those who love a good mystery and are ignorant of ?the nature and limits of scientific knowledge.
Sitchin promotes himself as a Biblical scholar and master of ancient languages, but his real mastery was in making up his own translations of Biblical texts to support his readings of Sumerian and Akkadian writings.
Jason Colavito, Zecharia Sitchen?s world. http://jcolavito.tripod.com/lostcivilizati...tions/id14.html?On page 163 of The Twelfth Planet, Sitchen presents a hand-drawn picture, without citation, of a presumably Sumerian cylinder with wings topped by a bird, of which he asked:
\"What or who was the Eagle who took Etana to the distant heavens? We cannot help but associate the ancient text with the message beamed to earth in July 1969 by Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft: Houston! Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.\"
As Paul Hafernik points out, this argument is pointless. But why should Sitchin have a rocket-fetish? After all, advanced civilizations should logically have moved beyond the need for fuel-inefficient rockets. However when Twelfth Planet was written, rockets were state of the art.
But all the rockets landing in ancient Sumer apparently did not impress the jaded residents of that civilization. Citing standard works on Sumer, Hafernik says there is no record of these visitations:
"Here we are at the heart of the matter. These Sumerians, direct descendants of the gods from the skies, privy to the creation of the solar system, eye witnesses to rockets coming and going, didn't record enough astronomical observations that even a single tablet (out of many tens of thousands) has made it to the present day."
Sitchin argues the reverse, claiming that his special and unique ability to understand and decipher Sumerian texts proves the visitation of the Anunnaki. Remember, Sitchin claims to be the only person in the world capable of accurately translating the texts. Sitchin says his Sumerian comprehension led him to Akkadian Seal VA243, which he claims shows an accurate view of the universe through the use of small dots to represent the planets. Unfortunately, the size of the dots does not correlate to the size of the planets.
And here?s a little more on the solar-system-depicting seal mentioned in this previous quote, and mentioned earlier in my statements:
Tom Van Flandern, Astronomer, and author of Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets.It doesn't get any better, because next we have an orb which does not correspond to anything known in the solar system, in a location which would be unstable for anything to form. Moreover the association of anything with Pluto is questionable, since Pluto would remain unknown even to advanced interstellar visitors, unless they carefully scanned the skies checking every tiny spot of light among hundreds of millions of brighter star images.
This is true even for advanced interstellar travelers. The volume enclosed by Pluto's orbit is so vast that the galaxy's 200,000,000,000 stars could be placed inside its orbit without touching! Pluto is smaller than many solar system moons (including our own), and in any case is a "double" object, since its moon Charon is fully half its diameter and relatively close. Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's; and there is good reason to suspect that Pluto & Charon are escaped moons of Neptune, not true planets. Nothing about the Pluto-orb suggests an identification with Pluto. It is merely that both are "left over\" after discussions of the eight major planets are done.
An association of the stray orb with asteroid or possible comet Chiron (not to be confused with Pluto's moon Charon), which is in an unstable orbit between Saturn and Uranus, would be easier to support than the Pluto identification. But from its relative size and spacing, why not associate this orb with Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the largest moon in the solar system? It seems as entitled to that status as is the orb associated with the Earth's moon. The non-uniqueness of any of the associations is plainly evident.
http://www.lauralee.com/vanflan.htm
There are many, many websites out there of Sitchen debunkers, and all of them are perfectly believable and rational in their explanation of where Sitchen is wrong and how that leads to the complete refutation of his theory. Most of the debunkers are not angry at Sitchen (yet), nor are they rabid anti-catastophists (for you Bubbu). The majority are men of letters that are tired of being asked about these silly theories and have decided to post responses on the internet to direct the questioners to. On the other hand, there are about a million pro-Sitchen sites out there, and almost every one is rabidly anti science and anti Sitchen-debunkers. For an example of where the illogic of Sitchen has led, all you need to do is run a Google search on the following string : Annunaki reptile draco bloodline Niburu. Let me know if you find anything resembling rational thought.
Finally, I would suggest that the reader take a good look at the websites I have linked to here. There is a lot of info on some of these sites that I will not go into here. In particular, there are reams of writings about Sitchens inability to properly translate cuneiform tablets on the Sitchen is Wrong website http://www.sitchiniswrong.com/. Several PDF files are there as well as tons of info on the Akkadian and Sumerian Mythology, for those that are truly interested. I cannot post everything here (at least not in one post) because 1) my computer is old and feeble, and 2) my ISP is rickety and cheap.
Any comments about this posting I will certainly try to reply to, as I have a mountain of reference sites saved that pertain to Sitchen and his hangers-on.
Harte