Cont’d:
It was in the ruins of the city’s great Nannar/Sin temple, the E.HUL.HUL (“House of Double Joy”), that archaeologists discovered four stone columns (“stelae”) that once stood in the temple, one at each corner of the main prayer hall. The inscriptions on the stelae revealed that two were erected by the temple’s high priestess, Adda-Guppi, and two by her son Nabuna’id, the last king of Babylon.
With an evident sense of history and as a trained temple official, Adda-Guppi provided in her inscriptions precise dates for the astounding events that she had witnessed. The dates, linked as was then customary to regnal years of known kings, could thus be—and have been—verified by modern scholars. It is thus certain that she was born in 649 B.C.E. and lived through the reigns of several Assyrian and Babylonian kings, passing on at the ripe old age of 104.
Here is what she wrote on her stela concerning the first of a series of amazing events:
It was in the sixteenth year of Nabupolassar,
king of Babylon, when Sin, lord of the gods,
became angry with his city and his temple
and went up to heaven;
and the city and the people in it went to ruin.
The sixteenth year of Nabupolassar was 610 B.C.E.—a memorable year, the reader may recall, when Babylonian forces captured Harran from the remnants of the Assyrian royal family and army, and when a reinvigorated Egypt decided to seize the space-related sites. It was then, Adda-Guppi wrote, that an angered Sin, removing his protection (and himself ) from the city, packed up “
and went up to heaven!“
What followed in the captured city is accurately summed up: “And the city and its people went to ruin.” While other survivors fled, Adda-Guppi stayed on. “Daily, without ceasing, by day and night, for months, for years,” she kept vigil in the ruined temple. Mourning, she “forsook the dresses of fine wool, took off jewelry, wore neither silver nor gold, relinquished perfumes and sweet smelling oils.” As a ghost roaming the abandoned shrine, “in a torn garment I was clothed; I came and went noiselessly,” she wrote.
Then, in the desolate sacred precinct, she found a robe that had once belonged to Sin. To the despondent priestess, the find was an omen from the god: suddenly he had given her a physical presence of himself. She could not take her eyes off the sacred garb, not daring to touch it except by “taking hold of its hem.” As if the god himself was there to hear her, she prostrated herself and “in prayer and humility” uttered a vow: “If you would return to your city, all the Black-Headed people would worship your divinity!”
“Black-Headed people” was a term by which the Sumerians used to describe themselves, and the employment of the term by the high priestess some 1,500 years after Sumer was no more was full of significance: she was telling the god that were he to come back, he would be restored to lordship as in the Days of Old, become again the lord god of a restored Sumer and Akkad. To achieve that, Adda-Guppi offered her god a deal: If he would return and then use his divine powers to make her son Nabuna’id the next imperial king, reigning over all the Babylonian and Assyrian domains, Nabuna’id would restore the temple of Sin not only in Harran but also in Ur, and would proclaim the worship of Sin as the state religion in all the lands of the Black-Headed people!
Touching the hem of the god’s robe, day after day she prayed; then one night the god appeared to her in a dream and accepted her proposal. The Moon god, Adda-Guppi wrote, liked the idea: “Sin, lord of the gods of Heaven and Earth, for my good doings looked upon me with a smile; he heard my prayers; he accepted my vow. The wrath of his heart calmed. Toward Ehulhul, his temple in Harran, the divine residence in which his heart rejoiced, he became reconciled; and he had a change of heart.” The god, Adda-Guppi wrote, accepted the deal:
Sin, lord of the gods,
looked with favor upon my words.
Nabuna’id, my only son, issue of my womb,
to the kingship he called—
the kingship of Sumer and Akkad.
All the lands from the border of Egypt,
from the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea,
in his hands he entrusted.
Both sides kept their bargain. “I myself saw it fulfilled,” Adda-Guppi stated in the concluding segment of her inscriptions: Sin “honored his word which he spoke to me,” causing Nabuna’id to ascend the Babylonian throne in 555 B.C.E.; and Nabuna’id kept his mother’s vow to restore the Ehulhul temple in Harran, “perfecting its structure.” He renewed the worship of Sin and Ningal (
Nikkal in Akkadian)—”all the forgotten rites he made anew.”
And then a great miracle, an occurrence unseen for generations, happened. The event is described in the two stelae of Nabuna’id, in which he is depicted holding an unusual staff and facing the celestial symbols of Nibiru, Earth, and the Moon (Fig. 102)
This is the great miracle of Sin
that has by gods and goddesses
not happened in the land,
since days of old unknown;
That the people of the Earth
had neither seen nor found written
on tablets since the days of old:
That Sin, lord of gods and goddesses,
residing in the heavens,
has come down from the heavens—
in full view of Nabuna’id, king of Babylon.
Sin, the inscriptions report, did not return alone. According to the texts, he entered the restored Ehulhul temple in a ceremonial procession, accompanied by his spouse Ningal/ Nikkal and his aide, the Divine Messenger Nusku.
The miraculous return of Sin “from the heavens” raises many questions, the first one being Where, “in the heavens,” he had been for five or six decades. Answers to such questions can be given by combining the ancient evidence with the achievements of modern science and technology. But before we turn to that, it is important to examine all the aspects of the Departure, for it was not Sin alone who “became angry” and, leaving Earth, “went up to heaven.”
The extraordinary celestial comings and goings described by Adda-Guppi and Nabuna’id took place while they were in Harran—a significant point because another eyewitness was present in that area at that very time; he was the Prophet Ezekiel; and he, too, had much to say on the subject
Ezekiel, a priest of Yahweh in Jerusalem, was among the aristocracy and craftsmen who had been exiled, together with King Jehoiachin, after Nebuchadnezzar’s first attack on Jerusalem in 598 B.C.E. They were taken forcefully to northern Mesopotamia, settling in the district of the Khabur River, just a short distance away from their ancestral home in Harran. And it was there that Ezekiel’s famous vision of a celestial chariot had occurred. As a trained priest, he too recorded the place and the date: it was on the fifth day of the fourth month in the fifth year of the exile—594/593 B.C.E.—”when I was among the exiles on the banks of the river Khebar, that the heavens opened up and I saw visions of
Elohim,” Ezekiel stated at the very beginning of his prophecies; and what he saw, appearing in a whirlwind, flashing lights and surrounded by a radiance, was a divine chariot that could go up and down and sideways, and within it, “upon the likeness of a throne, the semblance of a man”; and he heard a voice addressing him as “Son of Man” and announcing his prophetic assignment.
The Prophet’s opening statement is usually translated “visions of
God.” The term
Elohim, which is plural, has been traditionally translated “God” in the singular, even when the Bible itself clearly treats it in the plural, as in, “And
Elohim said let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness” (
Genesis 1: 26). As readers of my books know, the biblical Adam tale is a rendering of the much more detailed Sumerian creation texts, where it was an Anunnaki team, led by Enki, that used genetic engineering to “fashion” the Adam. The term
Elohim, we have shown over and over again, referred to the Anunnaki; and
what Ezekiel reported was that he had encountered an Anunnaki celestial craft—near Harran.
