The Deluge
Part 1
By Dominic Lourex
Copyright 2012 Dominic Lourex
Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Introduction:

I am sure a lot of people are familiar with the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood. The biblical tale of a man and his family who are told by god to build an ark and save themselves and two of each animal from a great flood that is coming to sweep away the world. This story has resonated throughout millennia of an angry god punishing mankind for their sins. This perspective of the story has always come to us through the tainted lense of religious faith and therefore been stripped of any chance of an objective interpretation. This story however is possibly a rich account of a major geological event that happened to our planet in hte short time of human history. This story is also interesting for it is replicated throughout the globe in ancient civilisations that are far reaching from the biblical lands of Noah. The story of the Deluge that covered much of the world can also be found in the cuneiform tablets in ancient Sumer, the Sanskrit texts from the Indus Valley, the inscriptions found in Central and South America and passed down through verbal folklore in many pacific islander cultures. How could all of these different cultures, who seemingly had no contact with each other, share a common tale of an earth shattering event thousands of years ago?  Who were the people on the earth prior to the deluge and how advanced had their societies evolved?  And most importantly, what can we learn from the past and could it happen again?

These are some of the questions that this book will endeavour to answer. It also needs to be stated from the outset that most of the research is coming from the great historians who have kept the flame alive of what "Really" happened and were not brainwashed or silenced by churches, governments or scientific communities when their research disputed the dogma and traditions of the day. In particular, I would like to mention a few of the modern day holders of the candle of truth, people like Zecheria Sitchin, Graham Hancock and Gavin Menzies. The work of these people has been an inspiration to me and has provided a wealth of knowledge on which the foundations of a lot of the arguments raised in this book will be based. Like the old saying goes "We are standing on the shoulders of giants" and I feel this is a fitting description as these sources support the claims that are put forward in the following pages. As I have always thought throughout my life, I am not here to answer the questions I am here to question the answers and this is the spirit in which this book is written.  To collate the findings that some great researchers have put together that support an alternative view of human history and to propose an argument that defies the status quo on our connections to our ancient ancestors, where we come from and what really happened when the Deluge covered the earth.

Chapter 1: Did it all begin in Sumer?

If you take a look in most modern text books that discuss the evolution of the human race they will describe how we evolved through stages from cro magnum man, to homo erectus then homo sapiens ad first appeared in Africa around 150000 years ago. This theory is accepted today as the most likely cause of how mankind came to be and is disseminated in schools and universities throughout the globe. It describes how we lived as simple hunter gatherer lifestyles and spread all over the earth with little or no agricultural skills or technology for producing food. The consensus is that for well over 100000 years human beings, genetically identical to us today, wandered around the globe in small groups looking for food. It is claimed that this nomadic lifestyle first changed when people began to cultivate food and domesticate animals. The beginning of this agricultural revolution saw people form small communities to share skills and trade food. As this trend continued small communities developed into villages and in time into towns. These gradual changes saw many developments in the skills and knowledge base of the people of the day. Complex social structures inevitably formed between people as they became dependent upon one another and the seed was planted for modern civilisation to be born.  It is claimed that the birthplace for modern civilisation can be traced back to an ancient land called Sumer.

Sumer was located in Mesopotamia which in time became Babylon and is now known as modern day Iraq. The land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers was dubbed the "Fertile Crescent" and this was the Kingdom of ancient Sumeria. It consisted of five main cities and some archeological finds in this region support the claim that it dates back to at least six thousand BC. It is also the place many firsts can be traced back to. These firsts include the first writing, the first astronomy, the first mathematics, the first kings and rulers, in fact some experts claim that over one hundred fundamental aspects of modern society can be found to have originated in Sumer. One of the most striking aspects of ancient Sumerian culture was the fact that they developed a way to write down their language. They used a method called cuneiform text. Literally tens of thousands of stone and clay tablets have been excavated from ancient ruins in modern day Iraq that have cuneiform text inscribed upon them. Archeologists and Syrilogists like Sir Henry Arthur Layard, George Smith, Noel Kramer and Sir Leonard Wooley made incredible discoveries during the eighteen and nineteen the centuries which included lost cities, buried treasures and tombs of kings and queens all of which proved the existence of highly developed societies. One of the finds proved to be particularly special because it gave us a direct written account of our ancient past.

Archaeologists discovered in the city of Nippur stone tablets that appear to be the first written account of the great flood. So far these tablets are the earliest written account of the story of the deluge that cultures across the globe have been writing and telling folk stories about for thousands of years. This collection of tablets does not unfortunately tell the complete story from beginning to end in a nice clearly sequenced series of events. Chunks of the story are missing due to damage to the tablets or missing tablets altogether however what has remained has been able to be deciphered and gives us enough information to piece together a grand epic of a tale. This legendary tale dates back further than the well-known story of Noah and his Ark. In fact there are many similarities between the two stories but in the earlier version the man chosen to survive this cataclysm was called Zuisudra.
The cuneiform tablets describe Ziusudra as a good man who is warned by a God called Enki that a flood is coming to destroy the seed of mankind.  "Take my word, give ear to my instructions, A flood will sweep over the cult centres to destroy the seed of mankind" (Pg 21, Hancock). There is a frustrating break in the narrative then the text continues "For seven days and seven nights, the flood swept over the land and the huge boat was tossed about by the windstorms on the great waters" (Pg 21, Hancock). The story continues with more interruptions but it goes on to describe how Ziusudra finally reaches land on the eighth day and sacrifices a beast to the God Enlil who sent the flood but chose to spare Ziusudras life. In return Ziusudra is given immortality for saving the seed of mankind. Although this story is claimed to be the first ancient written account it is by no means the only. More incredible discoveries were continued to be made in the Fertile Crescent during this period and arguably the most important for understanding our ancient past was the discovery of the famous ancient library in the city of Nivenah.
 
Historians tell us that Nivenah was ruled by a king called Ashrupunel from 668 to 627 BC and he was interested in knowledge, in particular written knowledge. This thirst for knowledge lead to his collection of thousands of ancient writings from all over the ancient land and the establishment of a great library. The Assyrian King, Ashurbanipal, oversaw one of the first great libraries in the world. This collection of tablets included Mesopotamian poems and stories as well as scientific knowledge, contracts of law and business, government records and historical accounts. All in all archaeologists discovered over twenty five thousand clay tablets between 1849 and 1851. Buried amongst the ruins in this ancient library twelve more tablets surfaced that also mention the great flood. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a classic Babylonian tale that describes the life and times of King Gilgamesh. Although it appears to written as a tale it nevertheless still mentions the deluge that swept the earth prior to Gilgamesh's reign. In the context of ancient Sumerian times it is quite possible that the knowledge of a flood that devastated the earth was common knowledge. This knowledge would inevitably wind up in fables and stories of the people who survived and their memories of what happened. 

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one such example that describes a king that longs for immortality. Gilgamesh, King of Urak, reigned around twenty seven thousand BC. After losing hi friend, Enkidu, he sets off on a mission to discover the secret of immortality. The story goes that he travels to a faraway land to find Utnapishtim, the man who survived a great flood in Babylon and was granted immortality by a God for saving the seed of mankind (pg 30, Fast). The twelve tablets discovered telling this story were written in the Akkadian language and wound up in the famous Ninevah library. Although the two sources that mention the Great Flood and its immortal hero are written in different languages and from different time frames it cannot be ignored they both share a common reference to a cataclysmic flood thousands of years ago. Understandably this offers little proof if you only take these two individual accounts of the story, most people need physical evidence backed by the majority of the scientific community before they are willing to give it any consideration as factual information. However, the thousands of clay tablets exhumed containing cuneiform text from ancient Sumeria have more mysteries to be deciphered. Amongst these scribed lumps of baked clay more information comes to light that does not fit comfortably with what we are told about the history of humanity by our anthropologists and main stream historians. Some of these tablets contain references to what is now known as the "Ancient Sumerian King List". This list describes the Kings and their length of reign over the ancient land prior to the flood. The reason the information in this list does not sit quite right with people is due to the lengths in years it is claimed they ruled. This lists timeline extends back over four hundred and thirty two thousand years and it states that the kings who reigned during this time did so for thousands of years each. For example from tablet WB-62, now located in the Ashmolean Museum, it shows us that the Kings ruled for many Sars each, one Sar equaling thirty six thousand years (pg 58, Sitchin). From everything we understand about human evolution this length of years for human life is not humanly possible. Now if this is what the ancient Sumerians scribed into the clay tablets thousands of years ago then we are left with four possible explanations. 

Possibility Number 1: 
Our interpretation of the tablets is wrong and the list only goes back perhaps four thousand or so years and the Kings ruled by normal human life spans. This would mean that the linguistic experts who have been deciphering these texts for over one hundred and fifty years have made mistakes in converting the symbolism used for numbers. This is a logical but unlikely situation due to the fact that scholars have deciphered the number system used on other examples and the calculations "add up" using these same symbols.

Possibility Number 2:
The lengths of years in the Sars (thousands) that each King is attributed to have reigned was intentionally made up. This possibility does not really make any sense given the amount of detailed information that describes each Kings reign, the city they ruled, the dynasty they ruled within and the successor to their throne. If this were part of some legend or folklore than it would have been far more likely to have been written in the style of a story or poem, which many of the tablets discovered have contained, not a list with specific dates and details.

Possibility Number 3:
The ancient Sumerians got the calculations wrong and overestimated the length of each kings reign. For a lot of people this is where they find an answer that sits comfortably with their current world view. These ancient people had recently stopped hunting and gathering food, discovered a way to write symbols on clay but stuffed up the calculations when recording their history. There is, however, a problem with this theory. The ancient Sumerians were fantastic astronomers and evidence has come to light that both they and the ancient Egyptian civilisations understood precession. Precession is the gradual wobble of the earth by one degree every 72 years. For this cycle to complete the full 360 degrees and have the earth back to the same position takes approximately twenty six thousand years. This effects the placement of the constellations of stars in the sky as the world slowly moves through this cycle. For the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians to have had this shared knowledge they either had highly developed technology to discover this phenomenon or they had been observing and recording the movements of the night sky for a very long time. This would mean that for at least twenty six thousand years they had been documenting these observations with meticulous accuracy through mathematical equations and charts. If this is how they discovered precession and they lived what we consider an average human lifespan of seventy to ninety years than this makes this accomplishment the most extraordinary long term achievement in the history of humanity. 

Possibility Number 4:
Finally we come to the fourth possibility of why the cuneiform texts state their kings lived for thousands of years and their history extends back for over four hundred thousand years. Many books have already been written in great detail by experts in this field so the brief summary provided here will barely cover the surface. Zecharia Sitchin (1920 - 2010) is one such researcher and author who dedicated his life to the study of how humans came to be and he wrote dozens of books on the subject. He argues that the kings in the Sumerian King List lived for so long because they were the Anunnaki. The Anunnaki are described in the cuneiform tablets as "Those who from heaven to earth came". The interpretations of the ancient texts by Sitchin suggests that an alien race lived on and ruled earth for thousands of years. These beings created modern homo sapiens by genetically engineering homo erectus so we would work for them as slaves. This fourth possibility is a wild explanation that complicates the story however, it needs to be acknowledged for it also ties into the original text mentioning the Great Flood as it was the God Enki, also an Anunnaki, who chose to warn mankind through Zuisudra. As Sitchin describes   
 “In this concept – a scientific conclusion of the Anunnaki – lies the centrality of their preoccupation with “seed” as the essences of life. When Enlil wished to have Mankind perish in the Deluge, it was the “Seed of mankind” that Enlil wished to destroy. When Enki revealed the secret of the flood to Ziusudra, he told him that “A Deluge will be sent to destroy the seed of mankind” (Sitchin, pg 160). 
Sitchin argues that this seed is in fact the genetic code we carry in our DNA, the mix of genes that the Anunnaki created when they merged our DNA with theirs to create homo sapiens. This story is a long and complicated tale that has been debated by historians and archaeologists since the discovery of the cuneiform tablets. Nevertheless, it still must be considered a possibility amongst the list of possible reasons when trying to answer the questions of how far back does the Sumerian King list go? Where did we come from? And was there really a flood that almost wiped out mankind thousands of years ago?
Chapter 2: Noah, Ziusudra and Gilgamesh
As stated in the introduction it can be hard to consider the story of Noah’s Ark without having any religious interference diluting the interpretation. The purpose of this book is to research and compare all the evidence, facts, myths and legends that share a common thread – the story of the Deluge. The story of Noah’s Ark , therefore, must also be examined even though it does come from ancient religious texts. The Bible, for some, is a great historical document that explains our existence and for others is a divisive work of fiction that has brought conflict and suffering to many. These beliefs can ultimately affect our responses when hearing the story of Noah and the Great Flood. With the intention of stripping back any religious beliefs that could block an objective view of how this story fits into the bigger picture, the story of Noah’s Ark will be discussed. 
The story of Noah’s Ark comes to us from the Old Testament which originally comes from the ancient Jewish texts of the Torah. These are the first five books of the Old Testament and date back at least three thousand years if not longer and they are the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Now the question that needs to be asked is where are these stories coming from? And how reliable is the source? Fundamentalists believe that the first five books of the Torah were written by Moses himself as they were dictated directly to him by God. This belief, when viewed from an academic rather than a faith based perspective, instantly runs into problems, particularly as these five books include the description of Moses death. Theologians, religious zealots and atheists alike have all been arguing about who wrote the Bible and the Torah and how it was compiled throughout history. This topic is broad enough for its own book and of course thousands of books have been written over the years to try and uncover the answers to these questions. The most commonly accepted theory today amongst scholars of who wrote the Torah is known as the Documentary Hypothesis or the PEFD theory. This theory proposes that four documents known only as P, E, F, and D were the recorded accounts that were acquired of Jewish history from the periods between eight hundred and three hundred BC. These accounts were blended and carefully collated into one single document at some point after three hundred BC and became the five books of the Torah which went onto become part of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible.
The book of Genesis is the first book and it describes the creation of the world and all the beings that inhabit it including man and woman. This first book also describes a story of a flood that is sent by God to destroy the world. The story goes that the man chosen to survive is called Noah and he and his family build an Ark and place two of each animal on it so they can survive the coming flood.  After forty days and forty nights of torrential rain and flooding the Ark finally reaches safe ground on dry land at Mount Ararat. A sacrifice is made to God and from here Noah, his sons and their wives have families and repopulate the earth.
Some scholars have argued that this story is just a variation of the original Sumerian story about Ziusudra found scribed into the cuneiform tablets long ago. This idea is quite understandably justified as the similarities of the two stories have parallel themes – A man warned by a God of an impending flood – Builds an Ark – survives and performs a sacrifice in honour of the God after his survival on dry ground. Furthermore, these two stories resonate from approximately the same part of the world, the Middle East. However, some points of difference also need closer examination. To begin with, the length of the flood:
- In the Ziusudra story the deluge lasts seven days and on the eighth day he reaches dry land. In the Noah version the deluge is much longer and lasts forty days. 
- In the Ziusudra story, Ziusudra is warned by one god “Enki” that the flood is being sent by another angry god “Enlil”. In the Noah version we only have one god and he is both sending the flood to punish and wipe-out mankind but also at the same time chooses to save mankind by warning mankind through Noah.
- In the Ziusudra story he is ordered to save “the seed of mankind”. In the Noah version he is ordered to save two of every animal. 
- In the Ziusudra story, Ziusudra is rewarded with immortality by the gods for his loyalty and success in saving the seed of mankind. In the Noah version he lives a long life until the age of nine hundred and fifty but eventually dies and his family repopulate the earth. 
So it can be seen that even though the two stories share common elements and themes they also differ from each other in details. This could possibly stem from the chance that these two ancient stories describe the same geological event, albeit telling individual accounts of survival and repopulation in those regions.
The region of the world these two stories originate from, the Middle East, is also something that should be examined when considering the possibility that the Ziusudra story and the Noah story are one and the same. It is all too easy for us in the twenty first century to think of countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Israel and Palestine as being close geographically. We have the ability today to fly from one side of the world to another twenty four hours or less. Between five and ten thousand years ago the journeys made between these lands would have been a major undertaking and although we do have evidence that these ancient cultures had contact and shared knowledge there is no evidence to support the idea that Noah is just a Jewish version of the original Sumerian story describing Ziusudra.
An interesting point that may be worth considering is the claimed longevity of Noah and other Old Testament Biblical figures. Many of these early characters that are described from Noah, leading way back in the bloodlines to the beginning of mankind, back to Adam are perplexingly attributed with long lifetimes. These lifespans are claimed to have exceeded well over what we consider humanly possible. Most of the Adam bloodline is reported as living well into the multiples of hundreds of years and quite a few, including Noah, reaching over nine hundred years old. Again it is the easy conclusion to say "they got it wrong" when looking at these extended lifespans, however like the Sumerian King List, we are faced with a claim of extended human longevity not possible to us today. As mentioned earlier, the Sumerian King List describes the "Sar" as a unit of three thousand six hundred years and these kings ruled for many sars. Sitchin has argued that the longevity attributed to the Adam bloodline could possibly be because they are in fact the "Nefilim" described in Genesis, Chapter six.
"The Nefilim were upon the Earth in those days and after that, When the sons of the Elohim came unto the daughters of The Adam, and they bore children to them."
Sitchin has put forward that the interpretation is that "The Adam" is plural for mankind as opposed to a single man called Adam and that these men and women were created by God/Anunnaki (Hebrew term Yahweh Elohim).  As Sitchin describes "it happened some 300,000 years ago - just when Homo sapiens appeared in southeast Africa. It was then that the Anunnaki jumped the gun on evolution and using genetic engineering, upgraded a hominid - say Homo erectus - to an intelligent, tool handling Homo sapiens (= "wise Man") to be their serf." (Sitchin, pg 153). Although Sitchin has spent a lifetime researching and writing books on this topic and the depth of his research is very broad I will attempt to summarise the points that bring us to the argument that indeed claims to support the longevity of the Sumerian King List and the Biblical lineage from Adam to Noah.
Sitchin has argued that: 
- The Anunnaki have come to Earth from another planet, Niburu.
- The Anunnaki (Hebrew Neholim) were the ancient rulers who survived for tens of thousands of years (sars) and have been recorded in the Ancient Sumerian King List. 
- They altered the DNA of some of the hominids they found to create mankind to use as workers for food production and mining.
- Some of the Anunnaki/Elohim took earthling females as wives and bore children to them. This was forbidden and caused conflict amongst Anunnaki heirachy.
- These children, with a mix of both human and Anunnaki DNA, were the Nefilim.
- The Nefilim were cable of extremely long life spans due to the mix of DNA they possessed.
- Enlil, the Anunnaki King reigning at the time of this inter species marrying and breeding, decided to destroy this abomination of mankind with a flood.
Again, if you take away religious interpretations and read Genisis six with clear objectivity and just read it as text it states:
"When The Adam began to multiply on the face of the Earth and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of Elohim saw the daughters of men that they were suitable, and they took them as wives all of which they chose." 
The claim that we have come from hominids that had their DNA tweaked hundreds of thousands of years ago by an alien race is indeed a big ask to consider. However, even with everything science has discovered about our past, the scientists are still faced with a missing link that defies an explanation. The story of Noah, the Nefilim and the Elohim have all come to us from the Torah and people have tried to decipher and understand these stories for thousands of years. Could it be that the creation of "The Adam" by the Anunnaki is the missing link and that the Nefilim were possibly the long living hybrids that the Anunnaki tried to wipe out with a great deluge thousands of years ago? 

Bibliography:
Sitchin, Zecharia. There Were Giants Upon the Earth: Gods, Demigods, and Human Ancestry: The Evidence of Alien DNA. 2010
Hancock, Graham. Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization. 2003
Sitchin, Zecharia.The Lost Book of Enki: Memoirs and Prophecies of an Extraterrestrial God. 2004
Menzies, Gavin. The Lost Empire of Atlantis: An Ancient Mystery Revealed. 2011