Anfang 2003 stieß ein Team deutscher Archäologen, die im Irak arbeiteten, auf eine der bedeutendsten Entdeckungen der Neuzeit. Tief unter dem Wüstensand entdeckten sie, was sie für das lange verschollene Grab des mythischen Königs Gilgamesch hielten, dem Protagonisten der ältesten Geschichte, die die Menschheit je geschrieben hat - dem Gilgamesch-Epos. Jahrhundertelang waren sich die Historiker uneins darüber, ob Gilgamesch tatsächlich existierte oder ob er nur ein Hirngespinst war. Doch dann entdeckten Jorg Fassbinder und sein Archäologenteam mit Hilfe moderner Technik eine ganze antike Stadt unter der Wüste, die erstaunlicherweise genau so angelegt war, wie die Stadt Uruk, über die Gilgamesch angeblich herrschte, in dem Epos beschrieben wird. Es gab Häuser, Gärten und Felder sowie "ein unglaublich ausgeklügeltes Kanalsystem", was die Archäologen dazu veranlasste, die Stätte als "Venedig in der Wüste" zu bezeichnen. Vor allem aber befand sich am Rande der antiken Stadt eine Art Grabstätte, von der die Archäologen annahmen, dass es sich um das Grab des alten Königs handelte. Fassbinder: "Ich will nicht sagen, dass es sich um das Grab von König Gilgamesch handelt, aber es sieht dem im Epos beschriebenen Grab sehr ähnlich." Es war schlicht und ergreifend ein verblüffender Fund, ein lange vermisstes Stück aus den Anfängen der Menschheitsgeschichte. Sicherlich, so glaubten die Archäologen, würde dies alles ändern und uns Geheimnisse enthüllen, von denen wir nicht einmal wussten, dass wir sie verloren hatten. Doch dann geschah das Undenkbare. Wenige Wochen nach der Entdeckung des Gilgamesch-Grabes marschierten die Vereinigten Staaten in den Irak ein und zwangen Fassbinder und sein Team, ihre Arbeit aufzugeben und aus dem Land zu fliehen, ohne das Rätsel zu lösen.
At the beginning of 2003, a team of German archaeologists in Iraq came across one of the most important discoveries of the new age.
Deep under the desert sand, they discovered what they considered the long-lost grave of the mythical king Gilgamesh,
the protagonist of the oldest history ever written by humans, the Gilgamesh epic.
Historians have been uncertain for centuries whether Gilgamesh actually existed,
as he is described in the epic as a giant over five meters tall,
a cross between a normal human and a Mesopotamian goddess.
For this reason, it was generally assumed that the story of Gilgamesh was only an invention of the myth,
until Jörg Fassbinder and his team of archaeologists, with modern technology,
plunged deep into the ground and discovered an entire ancient city under the desert,
which was surprisingly built in the same way as the city of Uruk,
which Gilgamesh ruled over, as described in the epic.
There were houses and gardens and fields, next to an incredibly sophisticated canal system,
which caused archaeologists to describe the place as Venice in the desert.
Even more important is that there was a cemetery on the outskirts of the ancient city,
which archaeologists considered to be the tomb of the old king, as Fassbinder expressed it.
I don't want to say for sure that it was the tomb of King Gilgamesh,
but it looks very similar to the one described in the epic.
What did Fassbinder want to tell us?
If the tomb of Gilgamesh was similar to the one described in the epic,
does that mean that Fassbinder and his team had discovered a tomb with the body of a giant over five meters tall?
It was quite simply an overwhelming discovery,
a long-lost piece of the origins of human history.
Archaeologists certainly believed that this would change everything and reveal secrets to us,
of which we did not even know that we had lost them.
But then the unthinkable happened.
Only a few weeks after the tomb of Gilgamesh was discovered,
the United States invaded Iraq and forced Fassbinder and his team to give up their work and flee the country.
And the mystery remained unsolved.
Or was it?
In 1849, an English historian and archaeologist named Austen Henry Laird
discovered in the ruins of the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal from the 7th century BC
a historical discovery in northern Iraq, which is considered one of the oldest libraries in human history.
There he discovered a many thousand-year-old blackboard,
which was covered with a strange writing that he could not read.
Who had written this document, Laird wondered.
And what was in it?
As incredible as the discovery was, it was only the beginning.
In the early 1850s, more than 15,000 fragments of similar blackboards were found at this site,
which were covered with the same mysterious writing.
These blackboards were sent back to the British Museum,
where scholars worked for decades to decipher them
by using other old blackboards, which were written in languages that they could understand,
to work backwards and try to translate.
The breakthrough came in the 1870s, thanks to a man named George Smith.
Smith was born in 1840, left school at the age of 14 and began working as a banknote engraver.
Although he was uneducated, he fell in love with messages from Iraq,
in which strange, indescribable artifacts were found, which were older than all known.
Following his curiosity, Smith began to visit the British Museum during his lunch break and his free time,
to study his collections, to slowly teach himself old languages
and to familiarize himself with old written writings.
In 1866, the museum staff finally noticed the strange young man
lurking in their archives and offered him a job.
If he wanted to become a translator, they told him,
he could start with the 15,000 fragments that Austen Henry Layard had found.
Smith worked on it for years, until finally the words written on the blackboards began to reveal themselves.
When they did this, Smith was shocked, when he found the basis of an incredible story.
There on the blackboards was a recording of an ancient flood of thought,
a flood that extinguished humanity except for one man and his family.
When Smith presented his results in 1872 at the Society of Biblical Archaeology,
at a presentation even attended by the British Prime Minister,
this sent shockwaves through Europe and the world,
as many scholars and theologians announced that this ancient flood story
was the truth of Noah's story in the Bible.
In 1875, Smith went even further and published a complete translation of everything he had discovered.
Although he did not know it at the time, he had begun to translate the oldest ever written story,
a legendary story that should simply be known as the Gilgamesh Epoch.
Tragically, Smith died in 1876, suddenly at the age of only 36.
But this was not the end of what he had begun.
For decades, generations, even to this day,
learned Smith continued to work, translated more and more blackboards,
and slowly revealed the whole history of the epoch.
And in fact, it goes far beyond a great flood.
In its entirety, the Gilgamesh Epoch tells the wonderful story
of the ancient Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh,
who ruled the territory of today's Iraq many thousand years ago.
It describes his beginnings as a tyrant and how the gods tried to teach him a lesson
by creating a rival named Enkidu.
After the two men have fallen out, none better than the other,
they become good friends and embark on a series of adventures,
which are described in detail in the Epoch.
When Enkidu dies, a disturbed Gilgamesh spends the rest of his life
looking for the secrets of eternal life,
a series of additional adventures that are told by the Epoch.
It is an incredible written work, of which scholars agree
that it has strongly influenced the epic literature genre in history,
including famous works such as Elias and Homer's Odyssey.
But what really drew people to history in the Neolithic,
when their translation was slowly revealed,
was the description of Gilgamesh himself,
with the amazing qualities of the great king.
He is said to have been the child of a man and a goddess,
which made him a third human and two thirds divine.
As such, he had a massive physical stature, he was over five meters tall
and was blessed with superhuman strength and endurance, as well as unusual intelligence.
In fact, the story describes Gilgamesh as unrivaled in all things.
But he was more than that.
In history there was a passage about Gilgamesh that read,
he explored the seats of power everywhere,
he knew the entirety of wisdom about all things.
In the course of history, the search for wisdom was something that drove people forward.
According to the Epoch, Gilgamesh had reached the end of the labyrinth
and attained the greatest wisdom about everything and everyone.
In summary, these were the characteristics of Gilgamesh,
which made the discovery of his grave so potentially world-shaking in 2003.
If archaeologists could uncover his grave and look at it,
they simply imagine what hidden secrets they could find.
Was Gilgamesh really a giant?
His grave, the home of a skeleton over five meters tall?
If Gilgamesh's grave were to be opened,
what records about his entirety of wisdom about all things could be buried with him?
What knowledge did he gain while searching for the secrets of eternal life?
Of course, these are exactly the kinds of secrets
that people all over the world would do anything to get their hands on.
In the last 20 years, learned historians and ordinary people have all discussed the same question.
Why did the USA invade Iraq?
The country was not involved in the attacks of September 11th,
and the official government line at the time,
when Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein hid mass destruction weapons,
has since proven to be a smooth lie.
Some have argued that the USA simply wanted control over Iraqi oil,
while others even believe that US President George W. Bush
simply wanted to put an end to what his father, President George H. W. Bush,
had begun in the early 1990s during the first war against Iraq.
Could it be that there was another reason?
Was it perhaps no coincidence that the invasion was almost immediately
after the discovery of the grave of Gilgamesh and all his potential secrets?
Remember, when the US military entered the country,
they immediately set up a camp around the Gilgamesh city.
They threw out scientists and sent media representatives home,
who had been dispatched to report on the events,
including important personalities from ABC News and the BBC.
The story immediately disappeared from the headlines of the global news,
except that strange reports emerged from the area over the course of weeks and months.
Witnesses claimed they had seen US military members
digging in the ground and removing materials from the city.
If the US military really opened the grave of Gilgamesh
and removed things from it, including the corpse of the great king,
then the question arises, which secrets were revealed to them
and what happened to them when they removed them.
When the US military took over Iraq, the grave of Gilgamesh was by far not the only place
where mysterious and inexplicable things took place.
In the Iraqi capital Baghdad stood the legendary National Museum of Iraq,
one of the most important houses of human history in the world.
A place of preservation, full of old manuscripts, statues and coins or artifacts,
which go back through the entire history of Iraq.
Shockingly, and although a delegation of scientists and historians
had warned at the beginning of the invasion that the museum was the most important place in the country,
they left the museum unguarded for days when the US military conquered Baghdad.
During this time, hordes of citizens broke into the institution
and made themselves of it with tens of thousands of priceless artifacts.
The amazing negligence of the US military in the protection of the museum
was explicitly condemned by the international community.
Whereby the president of the International Council on Monuments claimed
that it was no less than a crime against humanity.
And at least one important media source claimed
that the plundering was at eye level with the explosion of Stonehenge.
And yet the story only got worse over the course of the days.
Many witnesses reported that before plunderers even entered the museum,
special US military units were forced into whole vaults filled with artifacts.
They were loaded into heavy trucks and disappeared.
Could that be true? And if so, what did they remove? And where did they take it?
Finally, the US government decided to send a team to the international community
that consisted of specialists from the CIA, the FBI and the US Immigration and Customs Authority
to investigate the city.
The team was led by Colonel Michael Bogdanos,
a marine commander and lawyer who also happened to have a degree in classical studies
from Columbia University.
When the team arrived, they found most of the facility badly damaged.
As Bogdanos later described, it was not a nice sight.
It had been used as a battlefield.
Uniforms of the Iraqi army were scattered everywhere, as well as used armored fists.
The remains of hundreds of Ba'ath party cards and files swirled in a courtyard.
Why, Bogdanos wondered, had the Iraqi army chosen such a holy place
out of all the positions it had to defend, knowing full well that its fight was pointless?
But there was something else.
Something that amazed and disturbed Bogdanos and his team
When they penetrated deep into the hidden underground corridors of the museum,
they noticed that someone else had come there first.
And although some things were clearly missing,
the empty boxes and forged artifacts that the museum kept next to priceless works
to scare off thieves, remained untouched.
What that meant was clear to Bogdanos.
It was immediately clear that these thieves knew what they were looking for and where they had to look.
They were, in his words, organized and selective.
Strangely, the thieves seemed to have left behind the most valuable artifacts,
including the world's best collection of scroll seals and tens of thousands of old gold and silver coins.
If they had been robbers who had entered the underground corridors of the museum,
why hadn't they plundered the most valuable?
If they knew what they were looking for, well, what were they looking for?
Some have an answer.
In the 1920s, bizarre rumors began to emerge from Iraq,
which spread from government to government through the halls of power all over the world
about the discovery of an inexplicable piece of advanced, ancient technology.
It was called Stargate, a kind of portal that allowed its users
to teleport from one remote place to another.
It may sound incredible, but in fact this kind of rumor was not strange in Iraq.
In the old texts of the Sumerians, the original inhabitants of the region,
stories are told about their interaction with the gods called Anunnaki
and how these gods gave the Sumerians advanced wisdom and technology
and founded humanity as effectively as we know it today.
Some believe that these Anunnaki were not gods at all,
but ancient extraterrestrial visitors who came to Earth many thousands of years ago in the distant past.
The point is, however, that if Iraq was really visited by a group of extraterrestrial visitors
called Anunnaki at some point in the distant past,
the idea that they could have left traces of their advanced extraterrestrial technology behind
seems less impossible.
In fact, the idea that Iraq could have an old Stargate
was seen by governments all over the world as quite possible in the 1920s,
which caused most major powers to send representatives to the country
to search for the lost technology.
In fact, there are some who believe that the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941
was only a front for a fight between British and German interests
for control over the Stargate.
However, a Stargate was never officially found,
and the idea slowly disappeared from the public eye.
That was until the 1980s, when a new round of rumors emerged
claiming that Saddam Hussein had rediscovered the Stargate
and actually started studying it and trying to make it functional.
According to some, US officials were worried at the end of the 1990s.
Saddam could actually be just about to find out how the Stargate works,
which would enable him to travel to places far, far away
and perhaps even contact aliens
and obtain their advanced extraterrestrial technology.
A very serious scholar who believed this was Dr. Michael Sulla,
an Australian historian and professor at the American University in Washington, D.C.,
who actually wrote a scientific paper shortly after the invasion of Iraq,
which explained that the control over the Iraqi Stargate was the reason for the war.
Could this really be possible?
Could an ancient Stargate really have been the reason why the Iraq War began?
Maybe it goes even further.
More than a decade before the start of the Iraq War,
the US military fought with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War of 1991.
At this time, an amazing report appeared in the Russian newspaper Pravda,
describing an incident that was supposed to be known as Iraq's Roswell.
According to the report, a Russian colonel, who was in Iraq at the time,
how the US air force had shot down a UFO as it raced across the sky.
As he rushed to the crash site, he was speechless about what he saw.
As he described it,
About a third of the plane was torn out by the explosions of American rockets.
The Saudis didn't let us touch anything, but we managed to see a lot.
Devices, mechanisms and other things that absolutely confused us.
It was a relatively small vehicle with a diameter of about 4.5 meters.
It had three seats, probably for crew members,
but they were so small as if they were meant for children.
Apparently, aliens were only about a meter tall.
However, it seems incredible that there were no corpses at the crash site.
In addition, nothing was found there that could look like an engine.
Later, operators of Saudi radar stations told me
that no ejection or fallout of some subjects from the vehicle was registered.
Search helicopters overlooked the desert,
but the pilots found no surviving crew member near the crash site.
When the story of the colonel was true,
an obvious question arises.
Where were the pilots of the spacecraft?
Also, where was his engine?
Is it possible that these things were salvaged by the Iraqis
before Russian, Saudi or American representatives arrived on site?
And if so, what did they do with it?
Only in 2002, a caller in an American radio station
claimed to be a military insider.
The Iraqis had actually salvaged things from the crash site
and were actually trying to develop extraterrestrial technology.
According to the caller, the US government believed
that Saddam's scientists were just before a breakthrough
and that they had to be stopped before they could reach him.
A few months later, the USA marched into Iraq.
Is it possible that this was the real reason for the Iraq war?
Could the reverse technology be what the US military
removed from the National Museum of Iraq
before plunderers were allowed in?
Maybe mass destruction weapons were actually a code word
for extraterrestrial technology
and the US government did not lie about its intentions.
Regardless of whether this is true or not, the fact remains.
Whether it is about the secrets of Gilgamesh,
about the totality of all wisdom,
a Stargate or a replica of alien technology,
the US invasion of Iraq could be more than you think.
Share your opinion in the comments below.
Tell us what other mysteries we should cover in our next video,
as we are always open to your suggestions.
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