Our Cosmic Ancestors (5 page)

These astrologers and mathematicians called this time span the 'great constant' or the 'great year', but did not know that indeed this number existed and had been calculated tens of thousands of years before their time to be used by early civilizations, but then lost and forgotten as cataclysmic natural disasters and wars destroyed one civilization after another. The astrologers tried in vain to find the great constant and finally gave up. But now, by a chain of strange coincidences, this magic number has been found on an old clay tablet from Nineveh.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century there was a French consul, Paul Emile Botta, in Mosul, in what is now Iraq, who had very little to do. To kill time Botta took long horseback rides into the desert and the hills surrounding the city. He noticed that some of the mounds had so perfectly rounded forms that they could not have been made by nature. Also, old pottery shards were found on many of these hills, indicating that these sites were ancient human habitations.

One day in 1840 Botta gave into his urge to dig up one of the round mounds to see what was inside. He started excavating the Kuyunjik hill on the Tigris River, just outside of Mosul. Besides the usual broken pottery he found a great number of clay tablets in different sizes, but mostly measuring uniformly 17 by 22 centimetres or, as was discovered later.12 by 16 Sumerian fingers of 14 millimetres each. These tablets were covered with cuneiform characters, produced with an angled stylus. At the time there was much talk about and interest in this form or writing, but no one had deciphered it yet.

Cuneiform inscriptions had been discovered for the first time during the fifteenth century in the ruins of Persepolis, in Persia, the ancient capital of King Darius I. In 1472 the ambassador of Venice at the Persian court. Giosophat Barbaro, described these tablets, as did in 1602 Antonio de Gouveia. tne ambassador of Portugal at the same court and the explorer Pietro della Valle, who brought the first samples of cuneiform tablets pack to Europe.

Luckily no one at that time could understand these writings; because if the Pope hag read their message and discovered that it was the Earth that turned around the sun, or that the biblical version of the Flood was nothing out a pale reflection of the saga of Gilgamesh, or that a great pan of Genesis was inspired by Sumerian legends, it is not difficult to imagine what would have happened to the old clay tablets and to the people who found or read them.

Consul Botta tired fast from his efforts to collect broken pottery and clay tablets and started to lose interest, when he met in Mosul in 1842. a young Englishman by the name of Henry Layard. They became good f hems. smoking opium and hashish together; but fortunately Layard had to give up drug smoking because it made him very sick.

Botta told him about his excavations and Layard became very interested. together they climbed the Kuyunjik hill and Layard was convinced right away that this was a very interesting archaeological site worthy or serious exploration. But Layard had to go to Istanbul on a diplomatic mission and neither he nor Botta had the means for serious digging. Nothing came of this first project, but that did not discourage Botta.

In 1843 ne received a grant and started to dig up the Khorsabad hill next to Kuyunjik. He found the first Assyrian palace ever discovered, that of King Sargon II. who built this edifice as his summer residence in the vicinity of Nineveh in 709 BC, after he conquered Babylon. This palace yielded a very rich reward of artifacts, bas-reliefs in huge Quantities. statues of winged lions and winged bulls, and more. Most
of it landed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, with the exception of a boatload of treasures that sank in the middle of the Tigris when the current tore a large barge from its moorings.

No matter how many fabulous finds were later made by his successors, Botta will be remembered forever as the discoverer of the Assyrian civilization. He also enabled Layard to find Nineveh and the palace of King Assurbanipal, with its tens of thousands of clay tablets. When Botta left Mosul in 1846 he asked the new French consul, an architect by the name of Victor Place, to continue digging for treasures along the Tigris and to send all the loot to the Louvre.

When Layard returned to Mosul, he started to lay bare the mound of Nimrud (ancient Calah) where he found a considerable quantity of bas-reliefs and statues, which he shipped to the British Museum in London. But Layard's success at Nimrud hill did not make him forget his primary interest - the site of Kuyunjik, where he hoped to find Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. So he went digging there again. First he sank an 18-foot-deep shaft straight down until he hit a solid layer of brick. From there Layard ordered tunnels dug in several directions. He found a grand hall with a massive portal flanked by two winged bulls. After a month of terracing at Kuyunjik, Layard discovered nine great chambers of the palace of Sennacherib, who reigned from 704 to 681 and who was one of the most cruel and powerful kings the Assyrians ever had.

Each day brought new finds, statues, bas-reliefs, whole walls covered with magnificent glazed brick, mosaics of cuneiform signs in dazzling white on turquoise blue. It was there that Layard's crew found the famous alabaster bas-relief of the wounded lioness which is now in the British museum. But even all these priceless artifacts from the palace of Sennacherib would not have given Layard his proper place in history. What made him really famous was a discovery made later at the same site with the help of his assistant Hormuzd Rassam.

The French and the English were not at that time on very good terms, especially in the Arab lands. To avoid friction, Botta and Layard drew a vague line of demarcation across the Kuyunjik excavation site and each worked on his side. But one day, when his French colleague was not around, Rassam, assisting Layard, decided to start a tunnel from his side straight into French territory. By the greatest of coincidences
he hit the library of Assurbanipal, the Assyrian king who had reigned from 669 to 626 BC. The library contained over thirty thousand cuneiform clay tablets and was a collection of all the science and history known at that time, assembled from several previous civilizations.

In 1846 an Englishman, Henry Rawlinson, had broken the cuneiform alphabet by using a text that was engraved in three different languages on a slab of stone at Behistun, in Persia, at the time of Darius I, 2,500 years earlier. In Mosul nobody could read the newly discovered clay pages, so the tablets were all sent to the British Museum, where for twenty years they rested in the basement storage rooms.

Rassam had found the tablets in Kuyunjik in 1850. Twenty-two years later, in 1872, a young English Assyriologist, George Smith, began to translate them. Again by chance and sheer luck, he soon found the fantastic tale of the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh, his friend, Enkidu, and Utnapishtim, the friend of the gods, who had been warned about the coming deluge, built an ark, escaped the Flood, and landed on the mountain Nizir. Smith had the impression that he had read this story before, someplace in the Bible, but with other names.

What disturbed him even more was the fact that the cuneiform tablets he was translating were written in 700 BC and told stories about events that took place three thousand years before the actual imprinting of the clay tablets. The saga of Gilgamesh and his friends was older than the Bible; so the Hebrews who wrote the Holy Book had taken their inspiration from the Sumerian legend and invented the story of Noah and his Ark, embellishing it with a few minor details.

Unfortunately there was a chapter missing from the story of Gilgamesh. One clay tablet was not to be found in the storerooms of the British Museum. Most likely, it had been pulverized to dust long ago, but Smith had a great urge to go to Nineveh and was trying to persuade everyone that the missing cuneiform page still had to be in the ruins of Kuyunjik. All that had to be done was to find it.

Smith convinced some important people who were curious to read the final chapter of the Gilgamesh saga, and the necessary funds were collected. Smith arrived in Mosul in 1873. It took him only a few days digging at Kuyunjik to find the missing tablet. The benevolent intervention of the gods was demonstrated once more.

Smith continued to search and found about 3,000 more clay tablets at a lower level of the burned-down palace. All were marvelously well preserved; and Smith understood that the heavy wooden floors of the palace, when the conflagration took place, had fired the soft clay as if it was a kiln, thus keeping it from disintegrating over thousands of years.

His mission splendidly accomplished, Smith returned to London, translated and published the missing chapter of his continuing story of the hero Gilgamesh, and discovered several other interesting stories in the new tablets that he brought home.

One inscription of one hundred and fifty-two lines told about the six-year war conducted by Sennacherib, how he defeated Hezekiah, the King of Judah, how he defeated forty-six of his cities and gave the ruins to his allies, the kings of Gaza, Hebron, and Ascalon. It also told how King Hezekiah saved his life by paying a ransom of three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold, the equivalent in our present-day weight system of 18,000 pounds of silver and 1,800 pounds of gold. This document is the only one that directly authenticates the same events told by the Bible.

Smith also discovered that King Assurbanipal, known in history only as one of the most cruel tyrants, was in reality a sort of a genius of his time, who had learned and assimilated all the known sciences of that period, mainly astronomy and mathematics.

Assurbanipal did not act as later Christian conquerors did. He did not destroy a single document that fell into his victorious hands. All materials were carefully preserved and brought to Nineveh, where the king's scribes translated and classified them to be deposited in the library. We can say now that Assurbanipal created the first 'Encyclopedia Assyriana' and indeed his statue should be standing in halls of higher learning, replacing those of the ignorants who, not so long ago, believed that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

Among the tablets translated by Smith was a certain quantity that contained nothing but numbers, fantastically huge numbers, apparently derived from very complicated calculations. But in 1875 archaeologists
did not care for numbers any more than they do today, and so these tablets with the mathematical signs were put aside and forgotten.

I have not been able to find out to this day when and where somebody decided to study these mathematical tablets again; but the translation into our decimal system was finally published a few years ago, and one number stood out. It consisted of fifteen digits: 195,955,200,000,000. That represents nearly 200 million million, more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, if somebody were eccentric enough to measure this astronomical distance in millimetres! Many specialists in different countries tried to find out what this fantastic number could have meant three thousand years ago to the Assyrians, who were not known to be great mathematicians or astronomers. It seemed that Assurbanipal must have found this number somewhere, probably in Egypt, or Chaldea, or even in Persia.

I personally discovered the existence of the number in 1955, when I had just arrived in California. I found it in a recently published book and did not at that moment pay any particular attention. Then in 1963 in Paris, when I was told about the calendar of the Mayas, who also calculated with enormously high numbers, I remembered this number from Nineveh and began suspecting that it somehow could prove there was a tie between the Assyrian and the Mayan civilizations. At that time I made some calculations which showed that the Nineveh number could also be expressed as 70 multiplied seven times by 60.

Then one day I remembered that the Sumerians, who were the ancestors of the Babylonians, who in turn were invaded by the Assyrians, used calculations based on multiples of sixty more than three thousand years ago. We still do not know for sure who the Sumerians were and where they came from; but we have found out that they were truly great astronomers who knew the revolution periods of all the planets of the solar system, including Uranus and Neptune.

They were the ones who divided the day into 86,400 seconds with 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds each. Immediately the realization came to me that the number of Nineveh represented a very, very long period of time expressed in seconds! It did not take long to calculate
Ancient astronomical cycles derived from the

Nineveh constant of 2268 million days

name of the cycle Sidereal Mercury Sidereal Venus
Sidereal Earth
Sidereal Mars
Sidereal Jupiter
Sidereal Saturn
Sidereal Uranus
Sidereal Neptune Sidereal Pluto
Mercury-Venus
Venus-Earth
Earth-Mars
Mars-Jupiter
Jupiter-Saturn
Saturn-Uranus
Uranus-Neptune Neptune-Pluto
Nodal lunar month Sidereal lunar month Ecliptic lunar month Synodic lunar month Ecliptic lunar year Tropical solar year Sothic solar year Sidereal solar year Saros cycle
Lunar precession Lunar standstill
Meton cycle
Celtic cycle
Egyptian cycle
Mayan cycle
Climatic cycle
Solar precession
Sothic-tropical
Sothic-sidereal
number
_{solar days}
tropical

of cycles years

25,781,931 87.968585 0.240849997 10,093,427 224.700689 0.615210077 6.209,338 365.256328 1.000038651 3,301,404 686.980448 1.880890070 523,475 4,332.585128 11.862224557 210,796 10,759.217442 29.457760109 73,912 30,685.139084 84.013123715 37,681 60,189.485417 164.793344125 24,998 90,727.258181 248.402992239

15,688,504 144.564453 0.395804342
3.884,089 583.920708 1.598721862
2,907,934 779.935170 2.135391656
2,777,929 816.435553 2.235326389
312,679 7,253.445227 19.859274208
136,884 16,568.773560 45.363797084
36,231 62,598.327399 171.388534680
12,683 178,822.045257 489.598517701