The Atlantis Blueprint (28 page)

More than half a century passed before, in the 1970s, a copy of Barton’s book fell into the hands of a geologist named Christian O’Brien, who had spent much of his life working for British Petroleum in the Middle East. O’Brien had taught himself to read cuneiform script, and as he looked at Barton’s translation and the reproductions of the original texts, he concluded that Barton’s understanding left much to be desired. He set out to translate it himself.

O’Brien discovered that, far from being a ‘creation myth’ featuring Sumerian gods, the text seemed to be a down-to-earth account of how a group called the Anunnaki, or Anannage, built an agricultural community called Kharsag on a plateau in a mountain region. This settlement was also known as Ehdin – which, as O’Brien points out, reminds us of Eden. Readers of Sitchin’s
Earth Chronicles
will immediately recognise the Anunnaki as the beings from ‘the twelfth planet’ Niburu, who, the author claims, came to earth nearly half a million years ago in search of gold to be used (in some mysterious way) to protect their atmosphere from deterioration. Sitchin finds the evidence for these space visitors in the Old Testament, and in various ancient Sumerian texts (although not the Kharsag fragments). He believes that they actually created man as a slave to do the hard work of gold mining.

Christian O’Brien and his wife and co-writer Barbara Joy rejected the spacemen hypothesis. They are students of Eastern religion, and are inclined to accept the existence of ‘astral planes’, realms of existence beyond solid matter, so although they never commit themselves to where the Anannage came from, their belief seems to be that it is something more like a ‘parallel dimension’.10 (A similar division of opinion exists in the world of those who study UFO phenomena. At the time they first excited attention, in the late 1940s, most writers on the subject thought that flying saucers were
visitors from other planets; more recently, there is an increased acceptance of the view that ‘they’ may be literally ‘extraterrestrial’ in the sense of being able to control a ‘higher vibration rate’ and should not be thought of as purely material.)

In 1986, the O’Briens brought out their account of the Kharsag inscriptions in
The Genius of the Few: The Story of Those Who Founded the Garden of Eden
.1
1
It is hardly surprising that, with its careful, scholarly and unsensational approach, it should have failed to make the impact of Sitchin or Velikovsky. Too controversial for the academics, it was too sober and erudite for the popular audience who devoured ancient mysteries, but since that time it has attracted an increasing number of readers.

The title
The Genius of the Few
is a quotation from André Parrot, O’Brien’s mentor in archaeology, who pointed out that the flame of Middle Eastern civilisation blazed up simultaneously in a number of places: Susa, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Ashnunnak, Nineveh and Mari, ‘until, at last, thanks to the genius of the few… there was wrought forth, as in an alchemist’s crucible, a prodigious, many-sided art’.

What, ask the O’Briens, caused this simultaneous seeding of civilisation in so many places? They believe that the answer lies in the Anannage, or (as they prefer to call them) the Shining Ones, whose name is explained in the second chapter of
The Genius of the Few.
Why, O’Brien asks, does the Bible start with the sentence ‘In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, when it says that the Elohim created the heaven and earth? Elohim is plural, not singular, so it should read ‘the
gods
created the heavens and the earth’. If the Bible had meant God, it would have used the singular form
‘el’,
which actually means ‘shining’. It can be found in many ancient languages. In Sumerian it means ‘brightness’. In Babylonian,
‘ellu’
means ‘Shining Ones’. Even our English word ‘elf means a shining being, while in Cornwall – where I live –
‘el’
means an ‘angel’ (in old Cornish).

So the Bible is saying that ‘the Shining Ones’ who created heaven and earth said, ‘Let us make a man in our image.’ Yahweh, the leader of the Shining Ones, ‘planted a garden in Eden’, and the prophet Enoch did not ‘walk with God’ but with the Shining Ones.

O’Brien makes another important point. The word ‘heavens’ –
‘ha’shemin’
– originally meant ‘the highlands’. And ‘earth’ –
‘ha’ares’
– means ‘the ground’ or (in this context) the lowlands. So the Bible is actually saying that these Shining Ones (or angels) made the highlands and the lowlands, and the highlands included the Garden of Eden.

O’Brien also relates the story of the finding of the Kharsag material in Nippur, describing how it was unearthed from the Philadelphia museum basement by George Barton and translated as religious fragments, explaining why he found the Barton translation so unsatisfactory with lengthy quotations from the original text in Akkadian. O’Brien then tells the story of Kharsag after the Shining Ones had descended to earth. And he makes it clear that he regards these Shining Ones as more or less identical with the Watchers of the Book of Enoch.

Since talking about ‘Shining Ones’ or ‘Watchers’ may confuse, I suggest that here we refer to them simply as the civilisers, the ‘few’ whose genius created civilisation. The Kharsag epic makes it clear that they were not angels – otherwise they would surely have been immune to a plague that devastated Eden – but flesh and blood beings whose powers and talents were far beyond those of the human beings of the time.

The leader of the civilisers was called Enlil – the name of the god in whose temple the Kharsag cylinder was found. His wife, the Lady of Kharsag, was called Ninlil. They decided to name the settlement Edin, the Akkadian for ‘plateau’. Its other name, Kharsag, means ‘the lofty fenced enclosure’.

In other words, the Shining Ones built the first agricultural settlement in a world where human beings were primitive
hunters. The spot they chose was surrounded by mountains – O’Brien believes it was at the point where modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel join. The time, the O’Briens believe, was about 8,200
BC.
On the plateau of Eden the civilisers built houses of cedar wood, made a reservoir, and dug irrigation ditches. Enlil and other leaders among them had Great Houses, and there was even a maternity hospital. The surrounding hills were covered with orchards, they planted grain, and harvests were so plentiful that they allowed their neighbours to join the settlement and share the bounty.

Although Enlil was recognised as the leader, Eden was run on democratic lines, with a council of seven. If we suppose that the civilisers were mortal, then we must also assume that, over the 2,000 or so years that Kharsag existed, there were many Enlils, and that it became a title like ‘king’.

The Lady of Kharsag, Ninlil, is also referred to as the Serpent Lady, which led George Barton to assume that she was some kind of snake goddess. In fact, Andrew Collins cites another ancient fragment of text about the Watchers, which describes one of them as having a ‘visage like a viper’. Collins is inclined to feel that this suggests a hollow, gaunt face with slit-like eyes.

This use of another ancient fragment of text offers an opportunity of raising a question that may be troubling some readers: why should anyone take seriously these strange tales and legends about lustful fallen angels and Shining Ones who planted the Garden of Eden? We recognise the stories about the Greek gods as no more than myth; no one believes that Zeus really lived on Mount Olympus with his wife Hera and spent half his time turning himself into a bull or a swan to seduce mortal maidens.

One explanation is that the many different texts about – for example – Enoch or the Watchers suggests that these stories were passed down by word of mouth through many generations before they were written down. When we read the
Iliad,
we soon come to feel that this is not just an idle tale invented
by a minstrel or bard: it is based on real events. And archaeological research leaves no doubt that they occurred. The sheer number of ancient texts leaves little doubt that there were about a dozen different works about Enoch and the Watchers. As with the
Iliad,
they have the ring of folk memory.

As to the epic of Kharsag, it seems to tell a lengthy and detailed story that also has the ring of fact. For example, the story continues to tell how, after centuries of prosperity, harsh weather came to Eden, with storms, floods and bitter cold. Considered in the light of what we know happened at the end of the last Ice Age, after 14,000
BC,
when the climate fluctuated wildly and periods of warming were suddenly replaced again with much colder conditions, it seems likely that Kharsag would find itself under siege to the weather.

But it was more than just bad weather. There were tremendous storms, one of which O’Brien describes as the thousand-year storm, and the House of Enlil was destroyed by fire. Perpetual darkness fell, and heavy, non-stop rain caused flooding. Enlil said, ‘My settlement is shattered… By water alone it has been destroyed.’ But the final words of the lady Ninlil are perhaps the most significant: ‘The Building of Learning is cut off… the creation of Knowledge is ruined.’ Clearly, one of the major purposes of the settlement of Kharsag was to create knowledge. For the O’Briens, the Shining Ones were bringers of knowledge to the human race.

At this point, at the end of Tablet 9, the Kharsag epic breaks off. We do not know how many more tablets remain undiscovered, but the O’Briens believe that the Shining Ones went on to become the civilisers of humanity and the founders of Middle Eastern civilisation. In a later compilation called
The Shining Ones
,
¹²
which includes
The Genius of the Few,
they even suggested that the civilisers played some part in the civilisation of Central and South America and Atlantis. It also states that ‘unquestionably, the most rewarding descriptions of the Garden of Eden… occur in the Book of Enoch’. They speak at some length of Enoch, suggesting that when he was
taken by the angels to see the seven heavens, he actually visited Kharsag – the Garden of Eden. They point out that Enoch visited a Great House, that he described magnificent trees, and even the great reservoir.

We have already noted the passage from the Book of Enoch in which the angels are given long cords and sent off to ‘measure’. It is O’Brien’s view that the ‘angels’ were laying out part of the Garden of Eden, perhaps the irrigation system, but for Rand the passage could bear a completely different interpretation. The angels hurried off to the north, and from the South Pole all directions are north.

As to why the angels should be making a survey, Rand thought he already knew one possible answer. Having already concluded that a great number of the world’s sacred sites, such as Giza and Lhasa, were arranged on a symmetrical grid of ‘sacred latitudes’, it seems likely that there had been some kind of worldwide survey. The same thing is suggested by Hapgood’s ancient maps, ranging from China to an Antarctica free of ice. It looks as if ancient peoples who existed ‘before civilisation’ had an extraordinarily comprehensive knowledge of the surface of our globe.

Rand’s theory was that this survey was conducted by what was then the world’s most technically advanced civilisation, Atlantis, which was prompted by the recognition that some catastrophe was going to occur – almost certainly involving a movement of the earth’s crust – and that its purpose was to find out how far the crust mantle had already shifted. This, Rand felt, was why surveyors would set out to ‘make a survey’.

Hapgood believed that the crust movements that resulted in the shift of the North Pole from Hudson Bay to its present position began about 15,000
BC.
He seemed to feel that it had occurred slowly and, as it were, almost unnoticeably, although that is unlikely. The San Andreas Fault in California moves slowly, but the occasional earthquakes it produces can be dramatically noticeable.

Rand’s strong belief that the Atlanteans possessed a considerable knowledge of geology suggests that they must have studied the subject for a long time before the final catastrophe – perhaps for more than 2,000 years. In 9,600
BC,
the tilt of the earth’s axis was far greater than it is today, and the end of the Ice Age was marked by a great deal of flooding, so they would have had good reason to pay attention to geology.

Their efforts, as we know, proved to be a waste of time, at least if we accept that the final catastrophe destroyed their civilisation. But, Rand suggests, later generations, who came long after the catastrophe, saw the ‘markers’ laid down by the ‘surveyors’, which they took for sacred sites, and went on to build their own temples on these sites.

It seemed to me that the evidence cited by Hapgood in
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
along with Rand’s own researches, pointed conclusively to some former worldwide geographical knowledge.

Uriel’s Machine,
by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, lends a certain support to Rand’s (and the O’Briens’) ‘survey’ hypothesis, suggesting that Enoch knew all about the danger from the heavens. Uriel is one of the Watchers in the Book of Enoch – not one of the rebels, but one of those sent to earth to punish them. A part of the Book of Enoch called the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries is basically an astronomical treatise. At a certain point, Enoch is transported towards a mountain of ‘hard flint rock’ in the west: And I saw six portals in which the sun rises, and six portals in which the sun sets and the moon rises and sets… also many windows to the right and left of these portals.’13 Lomas and Knight were reminded of Stonehenge, with its ‘portals’ between the stone uprights of the trilithons.

In the early 1960s, the British astronomer Gerald Hawkins had started to investigate the possibility that Stonehenge might be a kind of Stone Age computer, constructed to calculate the moment of sunrise and moonrise over an 18.6-year cycle. His
Stonehenge Decoded
(1965)14 became an immediate bestseller,
although most astronomers were unconvinced. In fact, its ideas are now generally accepted, and in the 1970s the work of Professor Alexander Thom on ancient stone circles lent support to Hawkins’s theory.