Ancient Civilizations

>> We have to know where we come from if we're going to have

a clear idea of where we're going.

If we have illusions and false ideas about who and what we are

and how we got here, then that illusory state

is just going to continue into the future.

We need to understand the forces that were involved

in shaping the modern world.

>> Ancient Sumeria.

According to mainstream scholars,

this is the birthplace of civilization as we know it.

The birthplace of religion, the first science, the first war,

and the first written word.

Now all that is left is a message

buried beneath the sand.

>> It's one of Iraq's most famous archaeological sites,

rising from the desert near Nasiriyah in the southeast.

The Ziggurat of Ur, a massive, 4,000-year-old temple pyramid,

and the surrounding ruins of an ancient Sumerian city.

>> Archaeologists and scholars have been piecing evidence

together for centuries in this area of the world,

hoping to prove the biblical stories of the Garden of Eden.

>> Most people think, well, we're interested in the Middle

East because of the oil.

And there's a lot of truth to that.

But at the same time, you're going

to find people who are very interested in these different

esoteric philosophies, like the Freemasons in government,

the Christians in government.

All of these people have long had a strong interest

and also believe that there may be some kind of power

or some sort of connection there that if you make it,

it empowers you in some way.

>> What kind of power could these groups have if they could

prove how humanity started?

The search for something more powerful

than our own current reality isn't a modern concept,

but rather an ongoing search for the location

of the Garden of Eden, the proverbial beginning.

>> There's been a fixation amongst biblical scholars,

early archaeologists that everything in the Middle East

began on the Euphrates and the Tigris,

down in what is today lower Iraq.

And that this is where the Garden of Eden was,

this was where everything emerged, good and bad

in the Genesis tradition.

>> In 1922, English archaeologist C.

Leonard Woolley went to southern Iraq to hopefully find

the Garden of Eden based on early discoveries of Sumerian

cuneiforms.

However, what he actually uncovered instead

was the exact location of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur.

Was he getting close?

>> The early archaeologists were trying to prove the Bible.

And they were funded by biblical societies.

And that's-- in other words, they had to come up with

the proof.

And it ignored a lot of legends and traditions

which suggested that these cities were elsewhere.

>> Could Woolley have ignored some important information that

was revealed several years before?

In 1849, almost 75 years earlier,

thousands of Sumerian cuneiforms were found northwest of Ur

at the ancient cities of Sippar and Nippur.

>> In 1849, Henry Layard performed many excavations

on the Sippar site and discovered about 20,000

tablets, Sumerian and Akkadian.

And amongst all the tablets discovered, about a dozen

of them are about the Garden of Eden.

>> Could this be the location of the Garden of Eden,

or was this just another clue leading researchers to another

location?

>> Subsequent cultures, whether the Assyrians;

whether the Babylonians, who rose to prominence in that

area; who were not Sumerians, nevertheless venerated

and highly valued everything that the Sumerians did.

And that's why we can read the Sumerian language,

because those later cultures made

a project of taking Sumerian texts

and translating them into their language.

And those are languages that the scholars

could read because they were Semitic languages.

They belong to a language family where

the code could be cracked.

Whereas Sumerian was an isolate.

And without those translations done

by later cultures who nevertheless had contact

with Sumer, we would not be able to read those Sumerian

texts at all.

>> Were these later cultures able to decipher the beginning

of humanity?

Sumero-Akkadian researcher and author

of eight books regarding Sumerian translation, Anton

Parks, believes that for hundreds of years,

we have been translating these tablets wrong.

>>

>> Gary Zeitler, who is a scientist who worked

on the SETI project for many years and collaborated with

NASA, he was very interested in the Sumerian translations.

And he provided me with these 10 tablets found at Sippar

to check symbols one-by-one.

I noticed one translation saying one thing and the other

saying sometimes the complete opposite.

The true translations did not comply.

I persistently did research on Hebrew,

but nothing was coming out of it.

And then completely by chance, I came

across a Sumero-Akkadian lexicon.

And this is when I could finally, slowly

start to translate the tablets.

>> What Anton Parks began to translate was a completely

different version of the Garden of Eden than we've heard

before.

Not only had the words been mistranslated,

the actual location had been overlooked.

>> In biblical text, we constantly read about this idea

of heaven or paradise.

This comes from the Greek paradeisos.

And this literally means "enclosure for wild animals,"

not paradise, a term that was later transcribed as "garden"

during the Hellenistic era.

If we go back to the original translation in the Sumerian

tablets, it says, "the men who serve the gods

work for them in the garden and are treated like animals."

It is a very clear and recurrent theme.

They are slaves who serve the divine community.

In Hebraic text, we understand that the humans seemed happy

in this so-called paradise, which is, in fact, more

like a concentration camp, according to Sumerian text.

In my translations, we also discovered

the word "Kharsag," which translated

to "city of the gods."

It's interesting that all the highest points in Turkey

are named "Karadag," which strangely resembles "Kharsag."

Karadag translates to Black Mountain,

and also refers to the highest mountains in Turkey.

The only summit with the name Karadag

that is close to the Mesopotamian

plain and tributary of the Tigris,

and only a few kilometers from the Euphrates,

stands 29 kilometers south of the city Sirte,

and 19 kilometers southwest of the city of Ur.

Is this the paradise described in the Sumerian text?

>> Jerry sent me images of this site from Google Earth.

And at the back on the mountainside,

there is a little plain.

This is where I think the Garden of Eden of the gods

was located based on my translation of the text.

>> The Garden of Eden was where the four rivers emerged from,

two of which are easily identified as the Euphrates

and the Tigris, which do, indeed,

obviously flow through modern Iraq and empty out

into the Arabian sea.

But they rise in southeast Turkey.

And the other two rivers can be identified

as rivers that also rise in southeast to eastern Turkey.

All of these rivers emerge in the same general part

of the world which we know today as either eastern or

southeastern Turkey.

>> With the decoding of the Sumerian cuneiforms

and the location of these four rivers,

could this be the actual location for the Garden

of Eden?

The closest paved road to the proposed location

is Highway 5651.

As easy as it may seem to get to this location to excavate,

scholars and archaeologists consider

this area highly politically unstable

and it has remained untouched.

All we have at the moment is the language

to decode from the Sumerian cuneiforms, the cuneiforms that

describe a different kind of paradise.

These 10 tablets, according to Anton Parks,

tell the Sumerian version of how the Garden of Eden was created.

>> .

>> From my translations, I discovered when the Sumerian

gods arrived on Earth, they settled on this mountain

in order to create a colony and be able to survive.

Apparently, they suffered damage and ended up

on this mountain because of a war, and they found shelter.

Many experts believe that they came from the Pleiades star

cluster.

My opinion is that they came from there.

Maybe the war broke out around there.

But I really believe that this is

where the Anunnas were created.

During this conflict, on one side

you have a matriarchal regime, and on the other side

a patriarchal one with all these new gods.

There are conflicts in space.

Those new landscapes, like it says on the genealogy

of the land tablet.

These gods are going to change the way

life gets implanted on Earth.

The gods are going to create new conditions for life

to bloom, for their colony to thrive.

>> But who are these gods that hope to make Earth their home?

>> The epic of Atrahasis and others,

they talk about that the Earth was actually administered

by a conference of gods, or a group of gods in an assembly.

It wasn't just one god.