Zecharia Sitchin - The Earth Chronicles Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to the Seven Books of The Earth Chronicles

Dedicated to the memory of my beloved wife
FRIEDA RINA SITCHIN

INTRODUCTION

Wisdom hath built her house;
She hath hewn out her seven pillars.

PROVERBS 9:1

The seven books that comprise The Earth Chronicles began neither as a preconceived series nor even as a book. As an oak tree with seven branches, its acorn seed was a schoolboys query why a word in the Hebrew BibleNefilimthat derives from the verb meaning To Fall, To Come Down, was translated Giants. The schoolboy was I; the word is in Genesis chapter 6; the search for an explanation lasted a lifetime; the answer requiredas the Bible itself doesgoing back to the Beginning.

The quest for the biblical Beginning opened a Pandoras Box filled with countless more questions. Why does the Bible describe the Nefilim as sons of the gods who chose wives from among the daughters of the Adam? Who were the Elohim who had fashioned The Adam in their image? Was there a Garden of Eden, and if yes, where and what was it? Was there a Deluge, was there a Noah, and if yes, who was he? How did Mankind learn how the Heavens, the Earth, and Man himself had been created? What scientific knowledge had existed in antiquityindeed, how did Civilization itself begin? Was there a kingdom in a land called (in the Bible) Shinear that preceded ancient Babylon, Assyria, Egypt? And how did other civilizations arise around the world with uncanny similarities to the olden ones?

Unavoidably, the quest spread from Bible to archaeology. There was indeed a Cradle of Civilization in the ancient Near East; its monuments, artifacts, and written records unfolded a vivid history of lands and peoples whose tales of gods of heaven and Earth led through mythology to religion, from astronomy to genetics. Before long, what began as a simple question mushroomed to embrace virtually every scholarly discipline, ranging from the depths of Earth to the Solar System and Outer Space, from the Past to the Future, from the Beginning to the End of Days.

As one book followed another, spanning the continents, diverse cultures and even different religions, it became evident that these were all branches of the same one tree. A Global Theory emerged, and the tales of gods and men were rendered in my books as a unified history of Earth and Mankind. The pantheons of Greece and Rome, of Aztecs and Hindus are identified as those of Sumer and Babylon; the Mayan and Olmec calendars are compared to those of Assyria and Egypt; Inca tales of creation or a day the sun stood still echo the Hebrew Bible; pyramids and massive stone circles in varied lands reveal a basic kinship. It all makes sense because it explains the otherwise inexplicable, by my unique assertion that there is one more planet in our solar system which periodically nears our vicinity, whose astronauts had come to Earth, fashioned Mankind, were its gods, and when they left promised to return.

The result of decades of research, study, and writing is thus daunting in its scope. The seven books of The Earth Chronicles total more than 2,300 pages; and I have often been asked by readers: How does one keep a handle on all that mass of information? Guided by readers queries, this Handbook is the answer; alphabetically arranged, its hundreds of entries provide the relevant data about gods and demigods, kings and kingdoms, patriarchs and priests, archaeological sites and mythical places. Entries indicate links to related entries, andwhen appropriateadd the particular or innovative take of ZS on the subject. By applying a Uniform Answer to the diverse civilizations and periods, this Handbook serves as the first attempt ever to globalize ancient knowledge.

This Uniform Answer has stood the test of time: Every discovery, every technological advance, that have taken place in the past decades have invariably corroborated, without fail, the ancient evidence that others ignore or dismiss as Myth but that I consider Truth. In a wayin a significant waythe seven volumes of The Earth Chronicles have emerged as a depository of global Ancient Knowledge, the precious treasure that the Bible calls Wisdom.

They are, in a way, the Seven Pillars of Ancient Wisdom.

ZECHARIA SITCHIN

HANDBOOK KEY

The following key has been employed for the handbook entries:

• Bold = Sumerian
• Italics = Akkadian, Canaanite or (H) Biblical Hebrew
• CAPITAL letters = Egyptian
• The letter or sign for h eth, pronounced as ch in German/Scottish lo ch , is transcribed as an underlined h .
• Words in double quotation marks are direct quotes from Sumerian and Akkadian clay-tablet texts, the Bible, or other ancient texts and inscriptions.
• ZS = Zecharia Sitchin

A

Aaron: The brother of Moses who started the Jewish priestly line at the time of the Exodus.

Abel (H Hevel): The second son of Adam and Eve, a keeper of herds, who was killed by his brother Cain. For a Sumerian take on the subject, see Agriculture, Cain, Domestication.

Abraham (According to the Bible, changed from his original name Abram = Beloved Father or Fathers Beloved): The first Hebrew Patriarch, credited with the start of Monotheism, the belief in a sole Godidentified in the Bible as Yahweh. According to Genesis, God made a covenant with Abram to grant to his descendants the lands between the Brook of Egypt (a winter stream in the Sinai peninsula) and the Euphrates river in northern Mesopotamia, rewarding him for his unwavering fealty to the sole God, and for carrying out an assignment known from Genesis chapter 14 as The War of the Kings. In The Wars of Gods and Men ZS linked those events to ones described in tablets known as the Khedorlamoer Texts, and synchronized the timing and movements of Abram with the chronologies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, leading to the conclusions that Abram was born in 2123 B.C. in Sumers religious center Nippur (Ne.Ibru), from which came his identification as IbriA Nippurianin the Hebrew Bible, and per ZS, his name Ib.ru.um in Sumerian. He moved with his father Tera h , a priest, to Ur, Sumers capital, then to H arran (a site now in Turkey), and finally to Canaan (now Israel) on divine orders. ZS has shown that those migrations coincided with events recorded in Sumerian and later Babylonian texts, including the War of the Kings when he defended the Spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. After the destruction of that spaceport with nuclear weapons (recorded in the Bible as the upheavaling of Sodom and Gomorrah) and the resulting demise of Sumer, Abrams name was changed to the Semitic Abraham; his spouses was changed from Sarai to Sarah, and they had a son, Isaac. They were both buried in Hebron. See H arran, Khedorlaomer Texts, Nippur, Patriarchs, Spaceport, Ur, War of the Kings.