Giants upon the Earth, Nephilim Origins and Anunnaki Mysteries

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose. There were giants upon the earth in those days, and also thereafter too, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same mighty men of old, men of renown. The reader, if familiar with the King James English version of the Bible, will recognize these verses in chapter 6 of Genesis as the preamble to the story of the deluge, the great flood, in which Noah, huddled in an ark, was saved to repopulate the earth. The reader will also recognize these verses as the reason why, many decades ago, a schoolboy was prompted to ask his teacher why it is giants who are the subject of these verses, when the word in the original Hebrew text is nephilim, which, stemming from the Hebrew verb narfal, means to fall down, to be downed, to come down, and in no way, giants. The schoolboy was I. Instead of being congratulated on my linguistic acumen, I was harshly reprimanded. Sit down, the teacher hissed with repressed anger. You don't question the Bible. I was deeply hurt that day. For I was not questioning the Bible. On the contrary, I was pointing out the need to understand it accurately, and that was what changed my life's direction to pursue the nephilim. Who were they, and who were their mighty men, descendants? The search for answers started with linguistic questions. The Hebrew text does not speak of men who began to multiply, but of ha'adam, the Adam, a generic term, a human species. It does not speak of the sons of God, but uses the term bnei ha'elohim, the sons, in the plural, of the Elohim, a plural term taken to mean gods, but literally meaning the lofty ones. The daughters of the Adam were not fair, but tovoth, good, compatible. And unavoidably we find ourselves confronting issues of origins. How did mankind happen to be on this planet, and whose genetic code do we carry? In just three verses and a few words, 49 words in the original Hebrew of Genesis, the Bible describes the creation of heaven and earth, then records an actual prehistoric time of early mankind, and a series of amazing events, including a global flood, the presence on earth of gods and their sons, inter-species intermarriage, and demigod offspring. And so, starting with one word, nephilim, I told the tale of the Anunnaki, those who from heaven to earth came, space travelers, and interplanetary settlers, who came from their troubled planet to earth in need of gold, and ended up fashioning the Adam in their image. In doing so I brought them to life, recognising them individually unravelling their tangled relationships, describing their tasks, loves, ambitions, and wars, and identifying their inter-species offspring, the demigods. I have been asked at times where my interests would have taken me, were the teacher to compliment rather than reprimand me. In truth, I have asked myself a different question. What if, indeed, there were giants upon the earth in those days and thereafter too? The cultural, scientific, and religious implications are awesome. They lead to the next unavoidable questions. Why did the compilers of the Hebrew Bible, which is totally devoted to monotheism, include the bombshell verses in the prehistoric record, and what were their sources? I believe that I have found the answer. Deciphering the enigma of the demigods, the famed Gilgamesh among them, I conclude in this book, my crowning oeuvre, that compelling physical evidence for past alien presence on earth has been buried in an ancient tomb. It is a tale that has immense implications for our genetic origins, a key to unlocking the secrets of health, longevity, life, and death. It is a mystery whose unravelling will take the reader on a unique adventure and finally reveal what was held back from Adam in the Garden of Eden. In the spring of 334 BC, Alexander of Macedon led a massive Greek army across the Hellespont, a narrow straits of water separating Europe from Asia, now called the Dardanelles, and launched the first known armed invasion of Asia from Europe. His military forces, with some 15,000 elite foot soldiers and cavalry, represented an alliance of Greek states formed in response to repeated invasions of Greece by the Asiatic Persians, first in 490 BC, when the invasion was repulsed at Marathon, and then in 480-479 BC, when the Persians humiliated the Greeks by occupying and sacking Athens. The two sides have been warring since then over Asia Minor, where Greek settlements, of which Troy had been the most storied, were proliferating and clashed over the lucrative sea lanes in the eastern Mediterranean. While the Persians were organised in a mighty empire ruled by a succession of king of kings, the Greeks were fragmented into quarrelling city-states. The devastating and humiliating Persian invasions, coupled with the continuing clashes on land and sea, finally served as an impetus to form a league under the leadership of Macedonia, and the task of leading the counter-attack was entrusted to Alexander. He chose to cross from Europe to Asia, at Hellespont, the same Narrows that the Persians had crossed for their invasions westward. In times past the Narrows were dominated on the Asian side by the fortified city of Troy, the epicentre of the Trojan War that had raged there, according to Homer's Iliad, many centuries before. Carrying a copy of the epic tale given him by his tutor Aristotle, Alexander made it a point to stop at the ruins of Troy to offer sacrifices to the goddess Athena and pay homage at the tomb of Achilles, whose courage and heroism Alexander admired. The crossing by the army of thousands was uneventful. The Persians, rather than ward off the invaders at the beach, saw a chance to annihilate the Greek force by luring it inland. A Persian army, led by one of their best generals, was waiting for Alexander and his army along a river, forming a battle line somewhat inland. But though the Persians had the advantage of positions and numbers, the Greeks broke through. Falling back, the Persians assembled another army and even planned a counter-invasion of Greece. But in the meantime, their retreat enabled the Greeks to advance freely in Asia Minor, all the way to what is now the Turkish-Syrian border. In the fall of 333 BC, the Persian Shah-in-Shah, King of Kings, himself, Darius III, led a cavalry charge against Alexander's advancing troops. The battle, known as the Battle of Issus, and much depicted by Greek artists, ended with the capture of Darius's royal tent, but not of Darius himself. The Persian king, beaten but not defeated, retreated to Babylon, the western headquarters of an empire that stretched from Asia Minor, where Alexander had invaded, all the way to India. Incomprehensively, Alexander gave up the opportunity to crush the Persian enemy once and for all. Instead of pursuing the Persian remnants and their humbled king, he let Darius retreat eastward to Babylon and rouse the empire to continue the war. Giving up the chance for a decisive victory, Alexander instead set his course southward. The defeat of the Persians to avenge their previous attacks on Greece, the reason for the Greek state's alliance under Alexander, was deferred to a later time. It was Egypt, not Persia, the astounded Greek generals discovered. That was the real pressing destination for Alexander. What was on Alexander's mind, it was later revealed, was his own rather than Greece's destiny. For he was driven by persistent rumors in the Macedonian court, that his real father was not King Philip, but a mysterious Egyptian. As related in various accounts, the court of King Philip was once visited by an Egyptian pharaoh, whom the Greeks called Nectanibus. He was a master magician, a diviner, and he secretly seduced Queen Olympias, Philip's wife. Thus, though it was assumed when she gave birth to Alexander that it was King Philip who was the father, Alexander's true father was an Egyptian visitor. These persistent rumors, which soured the relations between King Philip and the Queen, gained credibility when Philip, some said in order to clear his way to marry a young daughter of a Macedonian nobleman, publicly accused Olympias of adultery, a step that cast doubt on Alexander's status as crown prince. It was perhaps then, but certainly not later than when the King's new wife was with child, that the story took another twist. The mysterious visitor who had presumably fathered Alexander was not a mere Egyptian. He was a god in disguise. The Egyptian god Amun, also spelled Amun, Amun, Amun. According to this version, Alexander was more than a royal prince, the Queen's son. He was a demigod. The issue of royal succession in Macedonia was settled when King Philip, reveling in the birth of a son by his new wife, was assassinated, and Alexander, at age twenty, acceded to the throne. But the issue of his true parentage continued to engage Alexander, for if true, he was entitled to something more important than inheriting a royal throne. He was entitled to inherit the immortality of the gods. With his accession to Macedonia's throne, Alexander replaced Philip as commander of the Alliance of Greek States in their invasion project. But before embarking on the march to Asia, he made his way to Delphi, a distant sacred site all the way in southern Greece. It was the location of ancient Greece's most famed oracle to which kings and heroes went to consult about their future. There, in the temple to the god Apollo, a legendary priestess, the Sybil, would go into a trance and, speaking for the god, would answer the visitor's question. Was he a demigod? Will he gain immortality? Alexander wanted to know. The Sybil's response, as always, was laconic, a riddle subject to interpretation. What was clear, though, was the indication that Alexander would find the answer in Egypt, at that country's most famous oracle site, the oasis of Siwa. The suggestion was not as odd as it may seem. The two oracle sites were linked by legend and history. The one at Delphi, a name that meant womb in Greek, was said to have been chosen by Zeus, head of the Greek pantheon, after two birds he had sent from two opposite places on earth met there. Declaring the site to be a navel of the earth, Zeus placed there an oval-shaped stone called an omphalos, Greek for navel. It was a whispering stone by which the gods communicated, and according to ancient traditions it was the most sacred object in Apollo's temple, and the Delphic Sybil sat on it when she pronounced her oracular responses. That original omphalos stone was replaced in Roman times by a replica, which visitors to Delphi can still see. The oracle site of Siwa, an oasis in the western desert some 300 miles west of the Nile Delta, was likewise chosen after a flight by two black birds, believed to have been priestesses of the god Amon in disguise. The main temple there was dedicated to the Egyptian god Amon, whom the Greeks considered to be the Egyptian Zeus. It too had a whispering stone, an Egyptian omphalos, and it assumed a sacred place in Greek mythicum history because the god Dionysus, once lost in the western desert, was saved by being miraculously guided to the oasis. Dionysus was a half-brother of Apollo, and used to fill in for him in Delphi when Apollo was away. Moreover, especially from Alexander's viewpoint, Dionysus attained the status of a god, although he was in reality a demigod. The son of Zeus, who, disguised as a man, had seduced a princess named Selene. It was, in essence, an earlier occurrence akin to Alexander's, a god in disguise, fathering a son by a royal human female. And if Dionysus could be deified and become one of the immortals, why not Alexander? Previous seekers of Siwa's oracular pronouncements included two famous generals, Seaman of Athens and Lysander of Sparta. Even more significant for Alexander was the demigod Perseus, another love child of Zeus, who managed to slay the monstrous Medusa without turning into stone. The legendary hero Hercules, famed for his challenging twelve labours, was also said to have consulted the Siwa oracle. Not surprisingly, he too was a demigod, son of Zeus who had impregnated the wise and beautiful Alcmena, having disguised himself as her husband, the king of an island. The precedence clearly fitted Alexander's own quest. And so it was that instead of pursuing the Persian king and his disarrayed army, Alexander set his course southward. Leaving behind some troops to garrison conquered territory, he marched along the Mediterranean Sea's coastal region. Except for the Phoenician stronghold of Tyre, whose navy participated in the war as Persia's allies, the Greeks' advance was hardly resisted. Alexander, by and large, was welcomed as a liberator from a detested Persian rule. In Egypt, the Persian garrison surrendered without a fight, and Alexander was given more than a liberator's welcome by the Egyptians themselves. In Memphis, the capital, the Egyptian priests were ready to accept Alexander's rumoured divine parentage by the Egyptian god Amun, and they suggested that Alexander travel to Thebes, today's Karnak and Luxor, in Upper Egypt, the site of ancient Egypt's immense temple of Amun, to pay homage to the god and to be crowned a pharaoh. But Alexander insisted on fulfilling the directive of the Delphi Oracle, and embarked on the dangerous three-week desert trek to Siwa. He needed to hear the verdict about his immortality. What had transpired at Siwa during the strictly private oracular session, no one really knows. One version is that when it was over, Alexander said to his companions that he received the answer that his heart desired. He had learned secret things that he would have not known otherwise. Another version reported that his divine parentage, though not a physical immortality, was confirmed, leading Alexander to henceforth pay his troops with silver coins bearing his image with horns, in the likeness of the horned god Amun. A third version, supported by what Alexander did thereafter, is that he was instructed to seek out a certain mountain with subterranean passageways in the Sinai Peninsula for angelic encounters, and then proceed to Babylon, to the temple of the Babylonian god Marduk. That latter instruction probably stemmed from one of the secret things that Alexander had learned in Siwa, that Amun was an epithet meaning the unseen that had been applied in Egypt to the great god Ra since about 2160 BC, when he left Egypt to seek dominion over the whole earth. His full Egyptian name was Ra Amun, or Amun-Ra, the unseen Ra. In my previous books I have shown that Ra Amun established his new headquarters in Babylon in Mesopotamia, where he was known as Marduk, son of the olden god whom the Egyptians called Ptah and the Mesopotamians Enki. The secret presumably revealed to Alexander was that his true father, the unseen Maw Amun god in Egypt, was the god Marduk in Babylon, for within weeks of learning all that, Alexander set out for distant Babylon. As summer began in 331 BC, Alexander reassembled a large army and marched toward the Euphrates River on whose banks, south of Midstream, Babylon was situated. The Persians, still led by Darius, also assembled a great cavalry and chariot force and awaited Alexander, expecting him to take the traditional route southward along the Euphrates River. In a great outflanking maneuver, Alexander swerved instead eastward toward the Tigris River, outflanking the Persians and reaching Mesopotamia in what had historically been Assyria. Learning of Alexander's strategy, Darius rushed troops to the northeast. The two armies met on the eastern side of the Tigris River, at a place called Guacamole, near the ruins of the erstwhile Assyrian capital Nineveh, now in the Kurdish part of northern Iraq. Alexander's victory there enabled him to recross the Tigris River. Without need to cross the wide Euphrates River, an open plain led to Babylon. Rejecting a third peace offer from Darius, Alexander marched on to Babylon. He reached the renowned city in the autumn of 331 BC and rode in through its magnificent Ishtar Gate, having been excavated and reassembled. It is now on display in Berlin's Museum of the Ancient Near East. The Babylonian noblemen and priests welcomed Alexander, delighted to get out of the sway of the Persians who had defiled and demolished Marduk's great temple. The temple was a great ziggurat, step pyramid, at the center of Babylon's sacred precinct, rising in seven precise, astronomically defined stages. Wisely, Alexander let it be known ahead of time that he is coming to pay homage to Babylon's national god, Marduk, and to restore Marduk's defiled temple. It had been a tradition for new Babylonian kings to seek legitimacy by having the deity bless them by grasping their extended hands. But this Alexander could not attain, for he found the god lying dead in a golden coffin, his body immersed in special oils for preservation. Though surely aware that Marduk had been dead, the sight must have shocked Alexander. Here lay dead, not a mortal, and not just his rumored father, but a god, one of the venerated immortals. What chance then did he, Alexander, a demigod at best, have to avoid death? As if determined to defy the odds, Alexander enlisted thousands of workmen to restore the Esagil, spending scarce resources on the task. And as he left to continue his conquests, he made it clear that he had decided to make Babylon the capital of his new empire. In 323 BC, Alexander, by then master of the Persian Empire from Egypt to India, returned to Babylon. But Babylonian omen priests warned him not to re-enter the city, for he would die if he did. Bad omens, which occurred soon after Alexander's first stay in Babylon, continued, although Alexander held off entering the city proper this time. He soon fell ill, seized with high fever. He asked his officers to keep vigil on his behalf inside the Esagil. By the morning of what we now date as June 10, 323 BC, Alexander was dead, attaining immortality not physically, but by being remembered ever since. The tale of Alexander the Great's birth, life and death has been the subject of books, studies, movies, college courses, and whatever else for generations. Modern scholars do not doubt the existence of Alexander the Great. And have written endlessly about him and his times, ascertaining every detail thereof. They know that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle was Alexander's teacher and mentor, have established Alexander's route, analyzed the strategy of every battle, recorded the names of his generals. But that respected scholars engage in that without an ounce of shame is amazing. For while they describe every aspect and twist in the Macedonian court and its intrigues, they laugh off the part that triggered it all, that of the belief in that court by Alexander himself by learned people in Greece, that a god could father a son by a female mortal. This disdain for myth extends to the wider subject of Greek art. Volumes that make private and public bookshelves buckle deal with every minutiae of Greek art in its varied styles, cultural backgrounds, geographic origins. Museums fill up galleries with marble sculptures, bronzes, painted vases or other artifacts. And what do all of them depict? Invariably, anthropomorphic gods, heroic demigods, and episodes from the so-called mythical tales, as this depiction of the god Apollo welcoming his father, the god Zeus, accompanied by other gods and goddesses. For reasons that defy understanding, it is the norm in scholarly circles to classify the records of ancient civilizations thus. If the ancient tale or text deals with kings, it is considered part of royal annals. If it deals with heroic personalities, it is an epic. But if the subject is gods, it is classified as myth. For who in his right scientific mind would believe, as the ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Babylonians did, that the gods were actual beings, omnipotent, sky-roaming, engaged in battles, scheming trials and tribulations for heroes, and even fathering those heroes by having sex with human females? So it is ironic that the saga of Alexander the Great is treated as historical fact, although his birth, oracular visits, itineraries and end in Babylon could not have taken place without including such mythical gods as Amon, Ra, Apollo, Zeus and Marduk, or such demigods as Dionysus, Perseus, Hercules and possibly Alexander himself. We now know that the laws of all ancient peoples were replete with tales and depictions of gods who, though they looked like us, were different, even seemingly immortal. The tales were essentially the same all over the globe, and though the revered beings were named differently in different lands, the names in the diverse languages had by and large the same meaning, an epithet denoting a particular aspect of the named deity. Thus the Roman gods called Jupiter and Neptune were the earlier Greek gods Zeus and Poseidon. Indra, the great Hindu god of storms, attained supremacy by battling rival gods with exploding thunderbolts, just as Zeus had done, and his name, spelled syllabically Indra, was found in god lists of the Hittites in Asia Minor. It was another name for the Hittite chief deity, Teshub, the god of thunders and lightnings, Hadad, windstormer, to the Assyrian and Babylonians, Hadad to the Canaanites, and even in the Americas where, as the god Viracocha, he was depicted on the Gate of the Sun in Tiwanaku, Bolivia. It is a list that can go on and on. How could that be? Why was it so? Advancing through Asia Minor, the Greeks passed imposing Hittite monuments. In northern Mesopotamia they came across the ruins of Assyria's great cities, desolate but not yet buried by the sands of time. Everywhere, not only the deities' names, but also the iconography, the symbols, were the same, dominated by the sign of the winged disc, Phignom X, which they encountered in Egypt and everywhere else, even on the monuments of Persian kings, as their supreme symbol. What did it represent? What did it all mean? Soon after Alexander's death, the conquered lands were split between two of his generals. For his rightful heirs, his four-year-old son and his guardian, Alexander's brother, were murdered. Ptolemy and his successors, headquartered in Egypt, seized the African domains. Seleucus and his successors, based in Syria, ruled Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the distant Asian lands. Both new rulers embarked on efforts to learn the full story of the gods and lands now under their control. The Ptolemies, who also established the famed Library of Alexandria, chose an Egyptian priest known as Manetho to write down in Greek Egypt's dynastic history and divine prehistory. The Seleucids retained a Greek-speaking Babylonian priest known as Berossus to compile for them the history and prehistory of mankind and its gods, according to Mesopotamian knowledge. In both instances, the motives were more than mere curiosity. As later events showed, the new rulers sought acceptance by suggesting that their reigns were a legitimate continuation of dynastic kingships that stretched all the way back to the gods. What we know of the writings of those two savants transports us to the very prehistoric times and events of the intriguing Genesis 6 verses. It takes us beyond the issue of whether myths might somehow be true a collective memory of past events and catapults us to the discovery that they are versions of actual records some of which are purported to be from days before the flood. Babylon and Marduk The rise and history of Babylon were closely interwined with the fortunes and ambitions of the god Marduk whose main temple, a ziggurat called the I-sag-do-il house whose head is lofty rose within a sprawling sacred precinct where a plethora of priests hierarchically arranged ranged from cleaners and butchers and healers to administrators, scribes, astronomers and astrologers. Marduk Duke, Mapinchim, son of the Pure Mound was the firstborn son of the Sumerian god Ea Enki whose domains were in Africa where, I have suggested, they were worshipped as the gods Ra and Ptah respectively. But Marduk sought overall dominion by establishing his own navel of the earth in Mesopotamia proper an effort that included the failed Tower of Babel incident. Success finally came after 2000 BC when a resplendent Marduk see illustration next page invited all the other leading gods to reside in Babylon as his subordinates. Babylonia attained imperial status with the dynasty started by King Hammurabi circa 1800 BC. The deciphering of cuneiform texts found all over the ancient Near East provided historical data about its religion-motivated conquests and rivalry with Assyria. After a decline that lasted some five centuries a Neo-Babylonian Empire rose again lasting to the 6th century BC. Its conquests included several attacks on Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple in 587 BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II fully corroborating the biblical tales. The city of Babylon as an imperial capital, a religious center and the symbol of its kingdom came to an end in 539 BC with its capture by the Achaemenid Persian king Cyrus. While he was respectful of Marduk his successor Xerxes destroyed the famed Ziggurat temple in 482 BC for by then it only served as a glorified tomb for the dead Marduk. In the days before the flood enlisted by King Ptolemy Philadelphus circa 270 BC Manetho, Greek from Menthoth HRC gift of Thoth compiled the history and prehistory of ancient Egypt in three volumes. The original manuscript known as Egyptiaca was deposited in the library of Alexandria only to perish there with other irreplaceable literary and documentary treasures in natural and man-made calamities including its final burning by Muslim conquerors in AD 642. He named it Mennepha the good place of men Memphis in Greek. Like Greek history and art the history and prehistory of ancient Egypt cannot be divorced from the active presence and physical existence of its gods. Wherever one looks or turns in Egypt the statues, sculptures, depictions temples, monuments, texts inscribed and illustrated inside pyramids or on coffin lids or on the walls of tombs all speak of, name and depict Egypt's gods and its leading pantheon. Whatever had been recorded and depicted before Manetho's days and discovered after his time corroborates his lists of pharaonic dynasties. Why not also accept the reality of gods followed by demigods as rulers in Agipi preceding human pharaohs? In the Seleucid domains the task of compiling the tale of the past was assigned to a Babylonian priest-historian named Berossus Greek from Bel-Rayushu. The lord, Belbas-Marduk is his shepherd who was born in Babylon when Alexander the Great was there. His task was much more complex than that of Manetho in Egypt for his compilation was not limited to one land. It had to embrace many lands different kingdoms and diverse rulers who reigned not necessarily in succession but sometimes contemporaneously in different and sometimes warring capitals. The three volumes he had composed called Babyloniaca and dedicated to King Antiochus the Fruan in 79 BC are no longer extant but portions of them were retained having been copied and extensively quoted in antiquity by contemporary Greek savants and later on by other Greek and Roman historians including Josephus. It is from those references and quotes collectively known as Fragments of Berossus that we know that Berossus chose to globalize the subject. He chose to write down not the history of one nation or one kingship but of the whole earth not of one group of gods but of all the gods of mankind in general of how it all gods, demigods, kingship kings, human beings, civilization had come to be a comprehensive history from the beginning to Alexander's time. It is from those fragments that we know that Berossus divided the past into a time before a great flood and the eras after the flood and asserted that before there were men gods alone ruled the earth. Alexander Polyhistor a Greek-Roman historian-geographer in the 1st century BC reported in regard to the pre-diluvial era that in the second book of Berossus was the history of the ten kings of the Chaldeans and the periods of each reign which consisted collectively of 120 shahs or 432,000 years reaching to the time of the deluge. Chaldeans was a term used to describe the astronomically savvy residents of ancient Mesopotamia. The grand total of 432,000 years comprised the combined reigns of the ten listed rulers whose individual reigns lasted anywhere from 10,800 to 64,800 years. The Greek historians who quoted Berossus explained that the great lengths of those rulers' reigns were actually given in number units called shah each shah saros in Greek being equal to 3,600 years. The Greek historian Abidinus a disciple of Aristotle who quoted Berossus made clear that these ten rulers and their cities were all in ancient Mesopotamia and explained how their reign periods were rendered. It is said that the first king of the earth was Alloros. He reigned 10 shahs. Now, a shah is esteemed to be 3,600 years. After him, Alloprus reigned 3 shahs. To him succeeded Amilarus from the city of Panti-Biblon who reigned 13 shahs. After him, Ammonon reigned 12 shahs. He was of the city of Panti-Biblon. Then, Megalurus of the same place 18 shahs. Then, Dios the shepherd governed for the space of 10 shahs. Afterward, reigned Anodaphus and Oedoresus. There were afterward other rulers and the last of all Sisythrus so that in the whole their number amounted to 10 kings and the term of their reigns to 120 shahs. Apollodorus of Athens 2nd century BC also reported on the pre-deluvial disclosures by Berossus in similar terms. Ten rulers reigned a total of 120 shahs trust 432,000 years and the reign of each one of them was measured in the 3,600 year shah units. Indeed, all those who had quoted Berossus affirmed that he listed ten divine rulers who had reigned from the beginning until the great flood treating the deluge as a decisive event. The names of the ten pre-deluvial rulers rendered as Greek names by those who quoted Berossus and the lengths of their reigns totaling 120 shahs. Though the sequences of succession varied all quoting agree that an Aloros was the first and a Sisythros the last. Aloros reigned for 10 shahs 36,000 years Alaparos reigned for 3 shahs 10,800 years Amalon reigned for 13 shahs 46,800 years Amanon reigned for 12 shahs 43,200 years Megalaros reigned for 18 shahs 64,800 years Daunos reigned for 10 shahs 36,000 years Eudoresus reigned for 18 shahs 64,800 years Amemsinos reigned for 10 shahs 36,000 years Obates reigned for 8 shahs 28,800 years Sisythros reigned for 18 shahs 64,800 years Ten rulers reigned for 120 shahs 432,000 years The quoting from Berossus indicate that his writings dealt with several issues concerning mankind itself how it came to be how it attained knowledge how it spread and settled the earth In the beginning, gods alone were upon the earth Men appeared, according to the Berossus fragments when Deus, God also called Belos a name meaning lord decided to create man He used for the purpose a twofold principle but the results were hideous beings Men appeared with two wings some with four and with two faces Other human figures were to be seen with the legs and horns of goats Bulls likewise bred there with the heads of men Of all these were preserved delineations in the temple of Belos in Babylon Belos, Greek for Belbal and the lord was in Babylon an epithet for the god Marduk On the subject of how men attained intelligence and knowledge Berossus wrote that it came about Theus a leader of those early divine rulers named Oannes waded ashore from the sea and taught mankind all aspects of civilization He was a being endowed with reason a god who made his appearance from the Erythraean Sea that bordered on Babylonia Berossus reported that although Oannes looked like a fish he had a human head under the fish's head and had feet like a man under the fish's tail His voice too and language were articulate and human A representation of him Alexander Polyhistor added is preserved even to this day This Oannes used to converse with men He gave them insight into letters and sciences and every kind of art He taught them to construct houses to found temples to compile laws and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge It was Oannes according to the fragments recorded by Polyhistor who put in writing a tale that explained how mankind came to be creation having been preceded by a time in which there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters The Berossus fragments then include details regarding the defining event the Great Flood that separated the era of the gods from the times of men According to Abedinus Berossus reported that the gods kept knowledge of the coming devastating deluge a secret from mankind But the god Kronos in Greek legends a son of the god Uranus Sky and the father of the god Zeus revealed the secret to Sisythros the last named Sisythros of the ten pre-diluvial rulers Kronos revealed to Sisythros that there would be a deluge on the 15th day of Daisios and ordered him to conceal in Sipar the city of the god Shamash every available writing Sisythros accomplished all these things and sailed immediately to Armenia and thereupon what the god had announced did happen to find out whether the deluge had ended according to the Abedinus quotes Sisythros released birds to see if they would find dry land when the boat reached Armenia Sisythros made sacrifices to the gods he instructed the people who were with him in the boat to go back to Babylonia as for himself he was taken by the gods to spend the rest of his life with them Polyhista's account was longer and more detailed after reporting that after the death of Ardates or Obates his son Sisythros ruled for 18 Sars and in his time the great flood occurred Polyhista rendered the Chaldean account of it thus the deity Kronos appeared to him in a vision and gave him notice that on the 15th day of the month Daisios there would be a flood by which mankind would be destroyed he enjoined him to commit to writing a history of the beginnings middles and ends of all things down to the present term and to bury those accounts securely in the city of the sun god in Sipar and to build a vessel and to take into it with him his kinsfolk and his friends he was to stow food and water and put birds and animals on board and sail away when he had everything ready following these instructions Sisythros built a boat five stades long and two stades wide anticipating some raised eyebrows from the other townspeople Sisythros was instructed by his god to just say he was sailing to the gods to pray for blessings on men he then put on board his wife and children and closest friends when the flood subsided Sisythros let out some of the birds which, finding no food came back to the vessel on the third try the birds did not return and Sisythros inferred that land had appeared after the boat ran aground Sisythros, his wife his daughter and his pilot went ashore and were never seen again for they were taken to dwell with the gods those who were left behind on board were told by an unseen voice that they were in Armenia and were instructed to return to their land and rescue the writings from Sipa and disseminate them to mankind this they did they came back to Babylon they dug up the writings from Sipa founded many cities set up shrines and once again established Babylon according to the fragments Berossus wrote that at first all men spoke the same language but then some among them undertook to erect a large and lofty tower that they might climb up to heaven but Belus sending forth a whirlwind confounded their designs and gave each tribe a particular language of its own the place at which they built the tower is now called Babylon the similarities between the Berossus tales and those in the Bible's book of Genesis are readily obvious they extend beyond the subject of the deluge and match each other in many details the deluge according to Berossus occurred in the reign of the tenth pre-deluvial ruler Caecithros and began in the month Dysos which was the second month of the year the Bible Genesis 7.12 likewise states that the deluge occurred in the 600th year of Noah's life in the second month Noah having been the tenth pre-deluvial biblical patriarch starting with Adam like Caecithros Noah was told by his god that a devastating avalanche of water is about to happen and was instructed to build a waterproof vessel according to precise specifications he was to take aboard his family animals and birds as Caecithros did when the waters subsided both released birds to see if dry land reappeared Noah sent two birds first a raven then a dove Caecithros' boat came to rest in Armenia Noah's ark came to rest in the mountains of Ararat which are in Armenia another major event is similarly reported by both the Bible and Berossus the incident of the tower of Babel that resulted in the confusion of languages we have quoted above the Berossus version like it the Bible begins the tale in Genesis 11 with the statement that at that time the whole earth was of one language and one kind of words then the people said let us build a city and a tower whose top can reach the heavens Berossus states the same thing people set out to erect a large and lofty tower that they might climb up to heaven in the Bible God Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower that the children of the Adam had built he got concerned and confused their language so that they may not understand each other and scattered the people over the face of the earth Berossus ascribes the confounding of languages to the Lord Belus and attributes mankind's scattering to the deity's use of a whirlwind do such similarities mean that the opening chapters of Genesis are one large fragment of Berossus that the compilers of the Hebrew Bible copied from Berossus not likely for the whole Torah part of the Hebrew Bible its first five books from Genesis to Deuteronomy was already sealed canonized in a final version unchanged since then long before the time of Berossus it is a historical fact that the Hebrew Bible was already in its sealed version when the five Torah books and the rest of the Bible were translated in Egypt into Greek by order of the same Ptolemy Philadelphus 285-244 BC who had engaged Manetho to write Egypt's history the translation still extant and available is known as the Septuagint of the 70 because it was carried out by a group of 70 scholars a comparison of its Greek text with the Hebrew Bible leaves no doubt that those Savants had already in front of them the canonized version of the Hebrew Bible as we know it today a Bible that was already in its final form before the time of Berossus and Manetho did then Berossus use the Hebrew Bible as his source? that too is unlikely apart from his references to pagan gods Kronos Belus Oannes Shamash who are absent in the monotheistic Bible many particulars in his writings are not found in the biblical version so his sources had to be other than the Bible a most significant difference occurs in the creation of man tale with its terrifying mishaps in the Berossus version in contrast to the smooth let us fashion the Adam version in the Bible there are detailed differences even where the two versions dovetail as in the deluge story in regard to the size of the ship and more importantly as to who was taken on board to be saved some of the differences are not insignificant according to Berossus there were on board beside the immediate family of Noah also several of his friends as well as a skilled pilot not so in the Bible that listed just Noah his wife and their three sons and their wives this is not a minor matter if true then post-diluvial mankind genetically and genealogically does not stem solely from one Noah and his only three sons the whole tale of Oannes the god dressed as a fish wading ashore to grant civilization to Mankind is nowhere in the Bible also absent in the Bible is the reference to a pre-diluvial city named Sippar the city of the sun god Shamash and the safekeeping thereof every available writing by claiming that pre-diluvial records of beginnings middles and ends not only had once existed but were hidden for safekeeping and were retrieved after Babylon was resettled Berossus could have sought legitimacy for his version of prehistoric events but he also suggested that those records of the past contained clues to the future what the Bible and we nowadays call the end of days though the theme of linking the future to the past is part of biblical prophecy in the Bible it is first mentioned in respect to Jacob long after the deluge the logical conclusion that both the compilers of Genesis and then Berossus had access to the same or similar source material which each used selectively has been borne out by archaeology but in such a conclusion both similarities and differences take us back to our starting point the enigmatic verses in Genesis 6 who were the Nephilim who were the sons of the gods and who indeed was Noah