Ancient Aliens, Sumerian Cueniform Tablets, and Mathematics

by Liliana Usvat

Archeological Knowledge

As far as current archaeological knowledge can reveal, the first true civilization arose in Mesopotamian Sumer, located in present-day Iraq, at least 6,000 years ago. Sumerian culture exploded onto the scene virtually overnight, the cradle of human civilization.  A description of Sumer is a list of “firsts” for the human race. Among these “firsts” are: the first schools, the first historian, the first method of writing, the first library, the first doctors and pharmacopoeia, the first agriculture (and first “farmers’ almanac”), the first musical notation, the first bicameral legislature, and the first taxes.  The Sumerian legal code (also a first) included protection for divorced women and price controls on foodstuffs and wagon rentals.  Their religion influenced all that followed, with elements of the Sumerian creation epic filtered through the ages into the Old Testament (the garden of Eden, the evil serpent, the great flood, etc.).

Ancient Aliens Theory

Erich Von Daniken also known as the founder of the Ancient Astronaut Theory, theorizes about past alien influence in our past civilizations.  Von Daniken would publish his first book in 1968 while a hotel manager which introduced the theory that aliens from different planets visited Earth in the past and had direct communication and influence on how our civilizations were structured through religion and government.  For more than four decades, Erich Von Daniken has been writing and speaking about the past communication and influence aliens have had on our planet.

Von Däniken offers the following hypotheses:

The existence of structures and artifacts have been found which represent higher technological knowledge than is presumed to have existed at the times they were manufactured.  Von Däniken maintains that these artifacts were produced either by extraterrestrial visitors or by humans who learned the necessary knowledge from them. Such artifacts include the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Moai of Easter Island. Further examples include a medieval map known as the Piri Reis Map, allegedly showing the Earth as it is seen from space, and the Nazca lines in Peru, which he explains as landing strips for an airfield

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Another researcher of Ancient Aliens is Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin (1920-2010) was born in Russia and grew up in Palestine where he studied ancient Semitic languages and became one of the few to master the reading of the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians from these clay tablets. After studying at the London School of Economics he took up a career in journalism.  Then Sitchin began to develop his theory of ancient astronauts visiting earth in the past from the planet Nibiru (Planet X) and their colonization of territory in what is now part of Iraq and the genetic manipulation of humans there. He based his theories on his interpretation of Sumerian cuneiform tablets. He also claimed that Nibiru had an orbit that took it to the outer reaches of the solar system and would return soon.

Considered the father of alternative archeology, Zecharia Sitchin has a profound knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew and many other Semitic and European languages. This knowledge has enabled him in his research of such ancient cultures as Sumer, Egypt, and Mesoamerica. One of approximately 200 scholars on the planet who can read and understand ancient Sumerian written on clay tablets, Zecharia Sitchin has written a series of intriguing books including The 12th Planet, The Wars of Gods and Men, When Time Began, Stairway to Heaven, and The Lost Realms (Bear and Company). These books deal with Earth’s and humankind’s histories and prehistories and are based on information actually written on clay tablets by the ancient civilizations of the Near East. Sitchin’s analysis of Sumerian astronomy and cosmology is of most interest. It is Sitchin’s belief that astronomical knowledge actually declined from the Sumerian period, with much of the Sumerian astronomical knowledge only rediscovered during the Copernican revolution.

Clay Tablets

The British Museum’s collections database counts 30,943 “tablets” in the entire Nineveh library collection. The Ebla tablets are a collection of as many as 1800 complete clay tablets, 4700 fragments and many thousand minor chips found in the palace archives of the ancient city of Ebla, Syria. The tablets were discovered by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae and his team in 1974–75 during their excavations at the ancient city of Tell Mardikh. The tablets, which were found in site on collapsed shelves, retained many of their contemporary clay tags to help reference them. They all date to the period between ca. 2500 BC and the destruction of the city ca. 2250 BC. Today, the tablets are being held in the Syrian museums of Aleppo, Damascus, and Idlib.

Zecharia Sitchin was a world-famous author, who has used ancient Sumerian and other texts to present pictorial and textual evidence showing that “we are not alone.”  Recounting the incredible firsts of the Sumerian Civilization, Sitchin has argued that there is one more planet in our own solar system from which intelligent beings (Nefilim, Elohim, Anunnaki) had come.  He has gone on to suggest that they arrived on Earth from their planet, Nibiru.

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Mathematics

Sitchin writes, “Were the early Greek astronomers living in Asia Minor better informed than their successors because they could draw on Mesopotamian sources?” Sumerian astronomy and the required mathematics used to describe and predict celestial events were remarkably advanced.

They utilized a unit of measure called dub, which has been translated to mean both the 360 degree circumference of the Earth, and the “arch of the heavens.” Not only were the Sumerians aware of the spherical nature of the world, they used the concepts of the equator, poles, and lines of longitude and latitude. Also, the apparent retrograde motions of the planets (due to differences in orbital radii) were understood 6,000 years before renaissance-era astronomers would solve the puzzle.

An accurate Sumerian calendar dating back to 4400 B.C. acknowledged the precessional shift from 2,160 years before. The Sumerians used a 12-based numbering system which still influences numbering today; numbers 1-12 have individual names while subsequent numbers are contractions.

The number 12 was very significant to the Sumerians, representing the number of their principal gods which were synonymous with the planets known to them (they included the Moon and the Sun in their count). Does this mean that the Sumerians were aware of all of the planets known to us today, or was it just coincidence?

Astronomy

Sitchin describes numerous cylinder seals showing what he interprets to be schematic diagrams of the solar system.  These diagrams often show a planet larger than Earth between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These diagrams, along with Sumerian, Babylonian, and Akkadian creation epics lead Sitchin to believe that a collision of planets occurred early in the history of the solar system.

Mathematics as Universal Language

Sir Martin Rees published an article in New Scientist called Mathematics: The only true universal language. Let’s look at the opening paragraphs of this article:

IF WE ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe’s future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

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