The wars of gods and men, p.1
The Wars of Gods and Men, page 1
part #3 of The Earth Chronicles Series
Praise for The Earth Chronicles series
"Exciting . . . credible . . . most provocative and compelling."
—Library Journal
"A dazzling performance . . . Sitchin is a zealous investigator."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Several factors make Sitchin's well-referenced works outstandingly different from all others that present this central theme. For one, his linguistic skills, which include not only several modern languages that make it possible for him to consult other scholars' works in their original tongues, but the ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Hebrew, and other languages of antiquity as well.
"The devotion of thirty years to academic search and personal investigation before publishing resulted in unusual thoroughness, perspective, and modifications where need arose. The author's pursuit of the earliest available texts and artifacts also made possible the wealth of photos and line drawings made for his books from tablets, monuments, murals, pottery, seals, etc. Used generously throughout, they provide vital visual evidence . . . . While the author does not pretend to solve all the puzzles that have kept intensive researchers baffled for well over one hundred years, he has provided some new clues."
—Rosemary Decker, historian and researcher
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Praise for The Earth Chronicles series
Foreword
Chapter 1 • The Wars of Man
Chapter 2 • The Contending of Horus and Seth
Chapter 3 • The Missiles of Zeus and Indra
Chapter 4 • The Earth Chronicles
Chapter 5 • The Wars of the Olden Gods
Chapter 6 • Mankind Emerges
Chapter 7 • When Earth Was Divided
Chapter 8 • The Pyramid Wars
Chapter 9 • Peace on Earth
Chapter 10 • The Prisoner in the Pyramid
Chapter 11 • "A Queen Am I!"
Chapter 12 • Prelude to Disaster
Chapter 13 • Abraham: The Fateful Years
Chapter 14 • The Nuclear Holocaust
Epilogue
The Earth Chronicles: Time Chart
Footnote
Sources
Other Works by Zecharia Sitchin
About the Book
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Books of Related Interest
Copyright & Permissions
FOREWORD
Long before man warred with man, the gods battled among themselves. Indeed, it was as the Wars of the Gods that the Wars of Man began.
And the Wars of the Gods, for control of this Earth, had begun on their own planet.
It was thus that mankind's first civilization succumbed to a nuclear holocaust.
This is fact, not fiction; it has all been written down long ago—in the Earth Chronicles.
1
THE WARS OF MAN
In the spring of 1947, a shepherd boy searching for a lost sheep in the barren cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea, discovered a cave that contained Hebrew scrolls hidden inside earthenware jars. Those and other scrolls found in the area in subsequent years—collectively spoken of as the Dead Sea Scrolls—had lain undisturbed for nearly two thousand years, carefully wrapped and hidden away during the turbulent years when Judea challenged the might of the Roman empire.
Was this part of the official library of Jerusalem, carted away to safety before the city and its temple fell in A.D. 70, or—as most scholars assume—a library of the Essenes, a sect of hermits with messianic preoccupations'? The opinions are divided, for the library contained both traditional biblical texts as well as writings dealing with the sect's customs, organization, and beliefs.
One of the longest and most complete scrolls, and perhaps the most dramatic, deals with a future war, a kind of Final War. Titled by scholars The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, it envisages spreading warfare—local battles that will first involve Judea's immediate neighbors, which shall increase in ferocity and scope until the whole ancient world would be engulfed: "The first engagement of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, that is against the army of Belial, shall be an attack upon the troops of Edom. Moab, the Ammonites and the Philistine area; then upon that of the Kittians of Assyria; and upon those violators of the Covenant who give them aid. . . ." And after those battles, "they shall advance upon the Kittians of Egypt" and "in due time . . . against the kings of the north."
In this War of Men, the scroll prophesied, the God of Israel shall take an active role:
On the day the Kittians fall, there shall be mighty combat and carnage, in the presence of the God of Israel;
For that is the day which He appointed of old for the final battle against the Sons of Darkness.
The Prophet Ezekiel had already prophesied the Last Battle, "in the latter days," involving Gog and Magog, in which the Lord himself shall "smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thine right hand." But the Dead Sea scroll went further, foreseeing the actual participation of many gods in the battles, engaged in combat side by side with mortal men:
On that day, the Company of the Divine and the Congregation of the Mortals shall engage side by side in combat and carnage.
The Sons of Light shall battle against the Sons of Darkness with a show of godlike might, amid uproarious tumult, amid the war cries of gods and men.
Though Crusaders, Saracens, and countless others in historical times have gone to war "in the name of God," the belief that in a war to come the Lord himself shall be actually present on the battlefield, and that gods and men would fight side by side, sounds as fantasy, to be treated allegorically at best. Yet it is not as extraordinary a notion as it may appear to be, for in earlier times, it was indeed believed that the Wars of Men were not only decreed by the gods but were also fought with the gods' active participation.
One of the most romanticized wars, when "love had launched a thousand ships," was the War of Troy, between the Achaean Greeks and the Trojans. It was, know we not, launched by the Greeks to force the Trojans to return the beautiful Helen to her lawful spouse. Yet an epic Greek tale, the Kypria, represented the war as a premeditated scheme by the great god Zeus:
There was a time when thousands upon thousands of men encumbered the broad bosom of the Earth. And having pity on them, Zeus in his great wisdom resolved to lighten Earth's burden.
So he caused the strife at Ilion (Troy) to that end; that through death he might make a void in the race of men.
Homer, the Greek storyteller who related the war's events in the Iliad, blamed the whim of the gods for instigating the conflict and for turning and twisting it to its ultimate major proportions. Acting directly and indirectly, sometimes seen and sometimes unseen, the various gods nudged the principal actors of this human drama to their fates. And behind it all was Jove (Jupiter/Zeus): "While the other gods and the armed warriors on the plain slept soundly, Jove was wakeful, for he was thinking how to do honor to Achilles and destroy much people at the ships of the Achaeans."
Even before the battle was joined, the god Apollo began the hostilities: "He sat himself down away from the ships with a face as dark as night, and his silver bow rang death as he shot his arrow in the midst of them [the Achaeans] . . . For nine whole days he shot his arrows among the people. . . . And all day long, the pyres of the dead were burning." When the contending sides agreed to postpone hostilities so that their leaders might decide the issue in hand-to-hand combat, the unhappy gods instructed the goddess Minerva: "Go at once into the Trojan and Achaean hosts, and contrive that the Trojans shall be the first to break their oaths and set upon the Achaeans." Eager for the mission, Minerva "shot through the sky as some brilliant meteor . . . a fiery train of light followed in her wake." Later on, lest the raging warfare cease for the night, Minerva turned night into day by lighting up the battlefield: She "lifted the thick veil of darkness from their eyes, and much light fell upon them, both on the side of the ships and on where the fight was raging; and the Achaeans could see Hector and all his men."
As the battles raged on and on, sometimes pitching one hero against another, the gods, too, kept a watchful eye over individual warriors, swooping down to snatch away a beleaguered hero or to steady a driverless chariot. But when the gods and goddesses, finding themselves on opposing sides, began to hurt each other, Zeus called a halt, ordering them to keep out of the mortals' fighting.
The respite did not last long, for many of the leading combatants were sons of gods or goddesses (by human mates). Especially angered was Mars, when his son Ascalaphus was pierced to death by one of the Achaeans. "Do not blame me, ye gods that dwell in heaven, if I go to the ships of the Achaeans and avenge the death of my son," Mars announced to the other Immortals, "even if in the end I shall be struck by Jove's lightning and shall lie in blood and dust among the corpses,"
"So long as the gods held themselves aloof from the mortal warriors," wrote Homer, "the Achaeans were triumphant, for Achilles who has long refused to fight was now with them." But in view of the mounting anger among the gods, and the help the Achaeans were now getting from the demigod Achilles, Jove changed his mind:
"For my own part, I shall stay here,
seated on Mount Olympus, and look on in peace.
But you others, do go among the Trojans and Achaeans,
and help either side as you might be disposed."
Thus spake Jove, and gave the word for w
Whereon the gods took their several sides
and went into battle.
The Battle of Troy, indeed Troy itself, were long thought of as just part of the fascinating but incredible Greek legends, which scholars have tolerantly called mythology. Troy and the events pertaining to it were still considered to be purely mythological when Charles McLaren suggested, back in 1822, that a certain mound in eastern Turkey, called Hissarlik, was the site of the Homeric Troy. It was only when a businessman named Heinrich Schliemann, risking his own money, came up with spectacular discoveries as he dug up the mound in 1870, that scholars began to acknowledge the existence of Troy. It is now accepted that the Battle of Troy had actually taken place in the thirteenth century B.C. It was then, according to the Greek sources, that gods and men had fought side by side: in such beliefs the Greeks were not alone.
In those days, though the tip of Asia Minor facing Europe and the Aegean Sea were dotted with what were essentially Greek settlements, Asia Minor proper was dominated by the Hittites. Known at first to modern scholars only from biblical references, then from Egyptian inscriptions, the Hittites and their kingdom—Hatti—also carne to life as archaeologists began to uncover their ancient cities.
The decipherment of the Hittite script and their Indo–European language made it possible to trace their origins to the second millennium B.C., when Aryan tribes began to migrate from the Caucasus area-some southeast to India, others southwest to Asia Minor. The Hittite kingdom flourished circa 1750 B.C. and began to decline five hundred years later. It was then that the Hittites were harassed by incursions from across the Aegean Sea. The Hittites spoke of the invaders as the people of Achiyawa; many scholars believe that they were the very same people whom Homer called Achioi—the Achaeans, whose attack upon the western tip of Asia Minor he immortalized in the Iliad.
For centuries prior to the war of Troy, the Hittites expanded their kingdom to imperial proportions, claiming to have done so upon the orders of their supreme god TESHUB ("The Stormer"). His olden title was "Storm God Whose Strength Makes Dead," and Hittite kings sometimes claimed that the god had actually taken a hand in the battle: "The mighty Stormgod, my Lord," [wrote the king Murshilis], "showed his divine power and shot a thunder bolt" at the enemy, helping to defeat it. Also aiding the Hittites in battle was the goddess ISHTAR, whose epithet was "Lady of the battlefield." It was to her "Divine Power" that many a victory was attributed, as she "came down [from the skies] to smite the hostile countries."
Hittite influence, as many references in the Old Testament indicate, extended south into Canaan; but they were there as settlers, not as conquerors. While they treated Canaan as a neutral zone, laying to it no claim, this was not the attitude of the Egyptians. Repeatedly the Pharaohs sought to extend their rule northward to Canaan and the Cedar Land (Lebanon); they succeeded in doing so, circa 1470 B.C., when they defeated a coalition of Canaanite kings at Megiddo.
The Old Testament, and inscriptions left by the Hittites' foes, pictured the Hittites as expert warriors who perfected the use of the chariot in the ancient Near East. 'But the Hittites' own inscriptions suggest that they went to war only when the gods gave the word, that the enemy was offered a chance to surrender peacefully before hostilities began, and that once a war was won, the Hittites were satisfied to receive tribute and take captives: the cities were not sacked; the populace was not massacred.
But Thothmes III, the Pharaoh who was victorious at the battle of Megiddo, was proud to say in his inscriptions: "Now his majesty went north, plundering towns and laying encampments waste." Of a vanquished king the Pharaoh wrote: "I desolated his towns, set fire to his encampments, made mounds of them; their resettlement can never take place. All the people I captured. I made prisoners; their countless cattle I carried off, and their goods as well. I took away every resource of life; I cut down their grain and felled all their groves and all their pleasant trees. I totally destroyed it." It was all done, the Pharaoh wrote, on the say-so of AMON-RA, his god.
The vicious nature of Egyptian warfare and the pitiless destructiveness they inflicted upon a vanquished foe were subjects of boastful inscriptions. The Pharaoh Pepi I, for example, commemorated his victory over the Asiatic "sand-dwellers" in a poem which hailed the army which "hacked up the land of the sand-dwellers . . . cut down its fig trees and vines . . . cast fire into all its dwellings, killed its people by many tens of thousands." The commemorative inscriptions were accompanied by vivid depictions of the battle scenes (Fig. I).
Fig. 1
Adhering to this wanton tradition, the Pharaoh Pi-Ankhy, who sent troops from Upper Egypt to subdue the rebellious Lower Egypt, was enraged by his generals' suggestion that adversaries who survived the battle be spared. Vowing "destruction forever," the Pharaoh announced that he would come to the captured city "to ruin that which had remained." For this, he stated, "My father Amon praises me."
The god Amon, to whose battle orders the Egyptians attributed their viciousness, found his match in the God of Israel. In the words of the Prophet Jeremiah, "Thus sayeth the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: 'I will punish Amon, god of Thebes, and those who trust in him, and shall bring retribution upon Egypt and its gods, its Pharaoh and its kings.'" This, we learn from the Bible, was an ongoing confrontation; nearly a thousand years earlier, in the days of the Exodus, Yahweh, the God of Israel, smote Egypt with a series of afflictions intended not only to soften the heart of its ruler but also as "judgments against all the gods of Egypt."
The miraculous departure of the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land was attributed in the biblical tale of Exodus to the direct intervention of Yahweh in those momentous events:
And they journeyed from Succoth
and encamped at Etham, at the edge of the desert.
And Yahweh went forth before them,
by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way,
and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.
There then ensued a sea battle of which the Pharaoh preferred to leave no inscriptions; we know of it from the Book of Exodus:
And the heart of the Pharaoh and his servants
was changed with respect to the people. . . .
And the Egyptians pursued after them,
and they overtook them encamped by the sea. . . .
And Yahweh drove back the sea with a strong east wind
all that night, and dried up the waters;
and the waters separated.
And the Children of Israel went into the midst of the sea
upon dry ground. . . .
At daybreak, when the Egyptians realized what had happened, the Pharaoh ordered his chariots after the Israelites. But:
It came to pass at the time of the morning watch
that Yahweh surveyed the camp of the Egyptians
from the pillar of fire and cloud;
