gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (45 page)

We shall meet with those Serpents of Hebrew tradition shortly, but for the moment it is important to explore O’Brien’s conclusions regarding Kharsag’s identification as the original Garden of Eden. He located this mountain settlement of the Anunnaki not at Bingöl Mountain in the Armenian Highlands but at Mount Hermon (modern Jabal al-Shaykh, “Mountain of the Chief ”), which forms part of the Anti-Lebanon range and straddles the border between Syria and Lebanon, extending as far south as the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

NO CEDAR FORESTS

O’Brien identified Mount Hermon with Kharsag primarily because the text associates it with cedar forests. So even though the Sumero-Akkadians located their world mountain in the north, northeast, or even the east of what is today Iraq, O’Brien chose to place it in the extreme west, the direction of Lebanon’s celebrated cedar forests, because, in his opinion, there were no cedar forests in the Zagros Mountains. Yet as we have seen, cedar forests existed in abundance throughout the Zagros Mountains at the start of the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations. So thorough, however, was their extermination that much later scribes interpreted references to cedar forests in ancient texts as alluding to Lebanon in the far west. This was simply because the scribes were not aware that cedar forests had once existed in the mountains to the north and northeast of their kingdoms. As a consequence, some versions of the famous
Epic of Gilgamesh
have its hero embarking on his quest for the plant of immortality and ending up in the vicinity of Lake Van and the Armenian Highlands, while others have Gilgamesh in Lebanon, traveling as far as Mount Hermon.
³¹

If Kharsag is to be geographically placed anywhere, then it is going to be in the direction of the Eastern Taurus Mountains and Armenian Highlands, close to Lake Van. What is more, if Kharsag really was established where the Tigris and Euphrates sprouted forth, as the Nippur foundation cylinder suggests, this locates it in the vicinity of the Bingöl massif, making it the true “place of the gods,” in both Armenian and Mesopotamian tradition. Here too was the site of the terrestrial Paradise, which O’Brien was almost certainly right to identify with Kharsag, and thus the Duku mound, where the Anunnaki lived and were first created.

Whether or not Göbekli Tepe can claim some credit as the original inspiration behind the Duku mound, as Klaus Schmidt surmises, remains to be seen. Undoubtedly, it would have had some influence on the development of the various myths featuring the Duku mound, just in the same manner that the story of the first sheep and grain created on the Duku mound and given by the Anunnaki to humankind is an abstract memory of the introduction of animal husbandry and sedentary farming in the
triangle d’or.
Having said this, the vision of the Duku as an abandoned tell situated in a hilly or mountainous environment, on which was built the “Ancient City,” fits Göbekli Tepe perfectly. So in summary we can say that the concept of the Duku—as handed down across the millennia, until it became a feature in the cosmological world of the Sumerians, Akkadians, and later Babylonians and Assyrians—most likely constituted an amalgam of sites that included Göbekli Tepe in the
triangle d’or,
and another now lost site in the vicinity of Bingöl Mountain in the Armenian Highlands.

So who exactly were the Anunnaki, and what were they doing in the terrestrial Paradise, where in biblical tradition Adam and Eve are placed after being created by God? As we see next, in Mesopotamian tradition it was not God, but the Anunnaki who were responsible for the creation of the first humans.

31

THE MAKING OF HUMANKIND

A
s to who the Anunnaki might have been, we shall learn soon enough, and as to what they were doing in the terrestrial Paradise, the answer is clear—Kharsag, Eden, and Dilmun, as geologist and writer Christian O’Brien suspected, are all one and the same, and in Mesopotamian tradition it was here that the Anunnaki are said to have “made” humankind.

One story in particular talks about mythical beings called the Igigi being burdened with labor by their masters, the Anunnaki, and rebelling, only to be replaced by human beings.
¹
The account appears in the myth of Atrahasis, the Assyrian flood hero, where we find the Igigi being told to dig a watercourse in a paradise seen in terms of a garden.
²
The environment is actually very similar to the setting imagined by Christian O’Brien in his own translation of the Nippur foundation cylinder.

THE CREATION OF MAN

After “3600 years” of digging out the Tigris and Euphrates river beds to create water channels, seen as “the lifelines of the land,”
³
the Igigi decide they are not going to suffer this toil any longer and so rebel against the Anunnaki, who are under the leadership of Ellil (the Old Babylonian and Assyrian form of Enlil).
⁴
Apparently, they set fire to their tools and lay siege to Ekur, Ellil’s mountain house, where the other Anunnaki are also to be found. On learning why exactly the Igigi are up in arms, the Anunnaki council decides to make the first humans in order to carry out all further manual work on behalf of the gods.

The humans are created by the Anunnaki through the intervention of “far-sighted Enki” and some of the other Anunnaki.
⁵
To achieve this, the god Illawela “who had intelligence” (the god Kingu in other accounts) is sacrificed, and the Anunnaki immerse themselves in his blood to purify themselves.
⁶
Enki then provides clay to the womb goddess Nintu, also called Mami, who calls upon more womb goddesses to start molding together the blood of the god to create the first human beings “to bear the yoke . . . to bear the load of the gods.” From the god’s flesh a ghost comes into existence, so that the slain god might never be forgotten.
⁷

In another version of the Mesopotamian creation myth, the first man is said to have been Adapa, a name reminiscent of Adam, the first man of Hebrew myth, who is modeled from clay that is the color of blood.
⁸
In this instance it is not only Enki who provides clay for the creation of the first humans, but also his wife Ninkharsag, who is synonymous with Nintu and Mami. Together they mold together the blood and clay to create the likeness of the human form.

Ninkharsag, we must remember, is one and the same as the wise snake goddess Šir, or Muš, of the Nippur foundation cylinder, meaning that in Mesopotamian myth a goddess identified as a snake is involved in the creation of the first human beings. George A. Barton, the original translator of the Nippur foundation cylinder, sensed the biblical connection with this story when he wrote: “She [Muš] was very wise. Her counsels strengthen the wise divinity of Anu [the god of heaven], a statement which reveals a point of view similar to that of Genesis 3,”
⁹
a reference, very clearly, to Eve’s role as the progenitor of humankind in the Genesis story.

EVE, THE GIVER OF LIFE

Strangely, in Aramaic, the West Semitic language used in the Bible lands during the first millennium BC, the word for Eve (
,
chava
or
hava
) is more or less identical to the word for snake (
).
¹⁰
In Arabic also the name Eve,
hawwa,
means “snake,” although it can also mean “giver of life.” Life, Eve, and the Serpent of Temptation are ultimately bound together, reflections of each other, and if this is the case then the fact that Eve bears correspondences with the goddess Ninkharsag, Muš, or Šir, the wife of Enki, is significant. Could Eve simply be a Hebrew form of this snake goddess who was responsible for the creation of humanity, the same way that in biblical tradition Eve is considered to be the First Mother of humankind?

If so, then it strengthens still further the case for the Mush Plain being the Garden of Eden and Bingöl Mountain being not only Kharsag, and the Duku mound, where the Anunnaki lived and were created, but also the true “place of the gods” in Armenian tradition. Perhaps as both Klaus Schmidt and the current author surmise, the Anunnaki are to be seen as the instigators of the Neolithic revolution, whose memory is immortalized in the T-shaped pillars found in the various large enclosures at Göbekli Tepe. As we have seen, there is every chance that these divine ancestors are a memory of Swiderian groups who entered eastern Anatolia sometime during the Younger Dryas mini ice age, ca. 10,900–9600 BC, and went on to catalyze the Neolithic revolution in the
triangle d’or.

Yet there remains a stratum of activity concerned with this transformation of humanity from simple hunter and forager to animal herder and agricultural laborer that needs addressing, and this is the memory of the founders of civilization contained in the forgotten, fringe, and often heretical literature of the Judaic world. Here the mythical beings that provide humanity with the rudiments of civilization are named as
‘îrîn,
“Watchers.” As we see next, their story is told in the book of Enoch, one of the strangest yet most compelling holy books ever written.

32

THE COMING OF THE WATCHERS

W
hile researching the myths and legends of Bingöl Mountain I became intrigued by its ancient name of Srmantz, or Srmanç, which appears occasionally in old Armenian texts without explanation.
¹
In Greek, I found it written Σερμάντου (Sermantou),
²
which I asked writer and journalist Jonathan Bright, a colleague from Greece, to investigate on my behalf. He possesses a sound understanding of the origins of the Greek language and stood a good chance of identifying the root components behind this curious place-name. Without knowing anything about my findings concerning Bingöl Mountain, he felt compelled to respond in the following manner:

I cannot avoid noticing the resemblance of the word [Σερμάντου (Sermantou)] with the Enochian ‘Eρμώμ’ (Sherman-tu/Shermon-/Hermon-/Hermom. . .), where the 200 watchers have supposedly descended, so although Mt Hermon is identified as the one standing at the borders between Syria, Lebanon and Israel (Golan Heights), one cannot help but wonder . . .
³

One cannot help but wonder, indeed. Mount Hermon does indeed feature in “Enochian” texts, such as the enigmatic book of Enoch. This is a pseudepigraphical (falsely attributed) work of immense age, the oldest fragments of which have been identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which in their earliest form date to the third century BC.

One of the book of Enoch’s internal texts, known to scholars as the book of the Watchers, tells the story of the
‘îrîn,
a name given to angels in certain Hebrew works of early manufacture and meaning something like “those who are awake” or “those who watch” (in Greek,
γρήγοροι [egrêgoroi]; in Latin and Slavic, Grigori; and in English, Watchers).
^*18
It is said that two hundred of their number came together in an assembly on top of a mountain and swore an oath of loyalty before descending to the plains below. Here they took mortal wives and revealed to them the secret arts of heaven. For this they became outcasts, rebels, and reprobates—the first fallen angels, a crime for which they were rounded up, incarcerated by the heavenly angels, and forced to watch the slaughter of their giant offspring, the Nephilim, a word that means “those who have fallen” or the “fallen ones.”