A Lesson For Mankind In An Ancient Text

By James Donahue

Since they were discovered in 1872, the ancient clay tablets from the Assyrian period known as the Epic of Gilgamesh have fascinated anyone that studied the story they tell.

The Gilgamesh story tells of a flood, a family of humans that survive it, and contact with "gods" that came down from the sky. There is an implication that Gilgamesh is a superhuman god-man who was a product of a union between the gods and mortals. He is two-thirds god and one-third human, thus suggesting that these unions were going on for several generations.

In the story, a god figure, Anu, creates a companion for Gilgamesh, another powerful figure called Enkidu. And there is a female god figure, Ishtar, a daughter of Anu, who comes down to Earth and seeks to mate with Gilgamesh. She is rejected because Gilgamesh knows that she has known many other men. This, of course, begins a series of events when Ishtar seeks revenge.

For over a hundred years the Gilgamesh story was written off as a myth. But mythology we have begun to realize, is usually based on real events. The stories are often a human interpretation of events as they were lived, but not fully understood.

That archaeologists in Iraq in 2003 found what they believed to be the lost tomb of a real King Gilgamesh, suddenly gives credence to the Gilgamesh story. Scholars now are asking, if Gilgamesh really existed, are the stories on the clay tablets based on real events in his life? And if so, do the references to gods mating with humans reflect something that actually occurred? And what was it that made King Gilgamesh a superior human, two-thirds a god and one-third a man?

There are striking similarities between the stories told in the Epic of Gilgamesh and another book filled with ancient mythology, the Book of Genesis. Genesis also has a flood story and prior to this flood, talks about part-human part-angelic beings called Nephilim that come down among men and fornicate with the women. The offspring become "mighty men which were of old, men of renown."

While Genesis merely mentions the Nephilim and their association with humans, Gilgamesh appears to be the story of what was happening during that period in ancient history prior to the flood. Genesis is a detailed story about Noah and his family, and how they escaped the deluge. Gilgamesh includes the flood story at the end of the long epic. In that story, Noah becomes Utnapishtim who relates to Gilgamesh how he and his family built a ship and escaped.

Obviously both books are full of native mythology. But what are we really looking at here?

We believe these stories support a concept of alien intervention that utilized genetic manipulation to create the homo sapien, or modern man. Are they stories through mythology about beings that came to earth and altered the DNA of unborn babies? Is this why these children were considered super-humans by the existing primates; is it because they were uniquely different?

If we are to follow the story line, something happened to humans at this time, changing them from what they were to be what we now dub, "modern man."

Not only were these children able to think more clearly, they were creative and they had the ability and the desire to draw pictures of the world around them. They began building monuments and cities. Like Gilgamesh, they became rulers over other mortals. Most important of all, the new human was no longer bound by the rules of nature.

This was the real story of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. We were separated from the animal kingdom on Earth by the genetic shift that gave us the blood and memory of an alien race. We became, in effect, super humanoids.

The alien who caused all of this is represented in the Genesis story as the serpent. Visitations by the Nephilim appear to be a description of continued alien contact. The genetic manipulation with earth primates appears to have been a process that went on for many generations and involved the genetic alterations of numerous children. Thus there never was one Adam and one Eve. There may have been thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of special children produced in not only the first generation of primates, but in second and third generations during this important launching of human history.

It is interesting to notice that the Genesis story places the Nephilim visit in a sequence of events occurring just before the flood, and implied that the "mighty men" who were "of renown" were involved in a wickedness on the Earth. The story states that this was the reason God decided to destroy the human race and flood the planet.

Consider that any truth to be found in the Bible is manipulated to distort the story in favor of the Christian/Jewish religious belief system. Thus we find an image of the new man as an evil scourge upon the world that God chose to destroy.

The one righteous human, a man named Noah in Genesis, and Utnapishtim in the Gligamesh account, was warned about this doomsday event and assisted in building a floating vessel, or ark, on which he saved his family and various breeds of animals.

If the earth was truly flooded, an event like that would have destroyed not only all life, but would have brought a calamity that would have caused extinctions of all land creatures. A single wooden ark would not have been adequate to carry enough humans and animals plus the food and fresh water needed for all of these living things to remain alive long enough to survive that event. We are talking thousands of years before the planet returned to a point where it would support land life once more.

Creature of the sea would have survived a flood, if that is what really happened.

That a "god" was involved in helping Noah or Utnapishtim survive means that alien contact may have been made once more. Could the ark have been a device used to move not only this man, but a minimum of 144,000 humans through time or into a parallel world to start again?

And this is the thought some people entertain today. Now that we have overpopulated the world with foolish religiously brainwashed humans that failed to continue a natural order of spiritual and mental evolution, we have become a doomed race living on a dying planet. We need a few "righteous" humans who understand what went wrong to gather once more, as they did in Noah’s time, and call upon the god within to save a remnant of humans. Is our escape to be carried to yet another time or to a parallel earth in a parallel universe so that we might start the process again? Or have the "gods" decided this time there will not be another chance and we are destined to go extinct?

Perhaps the solution is that must find our own way out of this mess. Could we do as Stephen Hawking has suggested, discover a way to regenerate our earth-bound bodies to face the rigors of space, so that we can collectively escape a dying planet spinning around a dying sun? Science knows that if we go extinct this time, as all life has at least twice before, we do not have time to evolve from the simple prebiotic chemistries that might remain intact within the deep crevices of the globe.

As in Noah’s time, we must do the work. Noah and his "family" worked hard, building the ark and facing ridicule from the masses right up until the final hour. The task we face today is no less daunting. We must meet the challenge, despite all odds, or perish.

For us, the concept of perishing means not only extinction, but perhaps losing any chance of coming back.