EN.MEN.LU.AN.NA ruled 43,200 years; ' EN.MEN.GAL.AN.NA ruled 28,800 years. Divine DU.MU.ZI, Shepherd, ruled 36,000 years. Three kings ruled it for 108,000 years.
The list then names the cities that followed, Larak and Sippar, and their divine rulers; and last, the city of Shuruppak, where a human of divine parentage was king. The striking fact about the fantastic lengths of these rules is that, without exception, they are multiples of 3,600.
Another Sumerian text (W-B/62) added Larsa and its two divine rulers to the king list, and the reign periods it gives are also perfect multiples of the 3,600-year shar. With the aid of other texts, the conclusion is that there were indeed ten rulers in Sumer before the Deluge; each rule lasted so many shar's; and altogether their reign lasted 120 shar's - as reported by Berossus. The conclusion that suggests itself is that these shar's of rulership were related to the orbital period shar (3,600 years) of the planet "Shar," the "Planet of Kingship"; that Alulim reigned during eight orbits of the Twelfth Planet, Alalgar during ten orbits, and so on.
If these pre-Diluvial rulers were, as we suggest, Nefilim who came to Earth from the Twelfth Planet, then it should not be surprising that their periods of "reign" on Earth should be related to the orbital period of the Twelfth Planet. The periods of such tenure or Kingship would last from the time of a landing to the time of a takeoff; as one commander arrived from the Twelfth Planet, the other's time came up. Since the landings and takeoffs must have been related to the Twelfth Planet's approach to Earth, the command tenures could only have been measured in these orbital periods, of shar's.
One may ask, of course, whether any one of the Nefilim, having landed on Earth, could remain in command here for the purported 28,800 or 36,000 years. No wonder scholars speak of the length of these reigns as "legendary." But what is a year? Our "year" is simply the time it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun. Because life developed on Earth when it was already orbiting the Sun, life on Earth is patterned by this length of orbit. (Even a more minor orbit time, like that of the Moon, or the day-night cycle is powerful enough to affect almost all life on Earth.) We live so many years because our biological clocks are geared to so many Earth orbits around the Sun.
There can be little doubt that life on another planet would be "timed" to the cycles of that planet. If the trajectory of the Twelfth Planet around the Sun were so extended that one orbit was completed in the same time it takes Earth to complete 100 orbits, then one year of the Nefilim would equal 100 of our years. If their orbit took 1,000 times longer than ours, then 1,000 Earth years would equal only one Nefilim year.
And what if, as we believe, their orbit around the sun lasted 3,600 Earth years? Then 3,600 of our years would amount to only one year in their calendar, and also only one year in their lifetime. The tenures of Kingship reported by the Sumerians and Berossus would thus be neither "legendary" nor fantastic: They would have lasted five or eight or ten Nefilim years. We have noted, in earlier chapters, that Mankind's march to civilization - through the intervention of the Nefilim - passed through three stages, which were separated by periods of 3,600 years: the Mesolithic period (circa 11,000 B.C.), the pottery phase (circa 7400 B.C.), and the sudden Sumerian civilization (circa 3800 B.C.). It is not unlikely, then, that the Nefilim periodically reviewed (and resolved to continue) Mankind's progress, since they could meet in assembly each time the Twelfth Planet neared Earth. Many scholars (for example, Heinrich Zimmern in The Babylonian and Hebrew Genesis) have pointed out that the Old Testament also carried traditions of pre-Diluvial chieftains, or forefathers, and that the line from Adam to Noah (the hero of the Deluge) listen ten such rulers. Putting the situation prior to the Deluge in perspective, the Book of Genesis (Chapter 6) described the divine disenchantment with Mankind. "And it repented the Lord that he had made Man on Earth . . . and the Lord said: I will destroy Man whom I had created." And the Lord said:
My spirit shall not shield Man forever;
having erred, he is but flesh.
And his days were one hundred and twenty years.
Generations of scholars have read the verse "And his days shall be a hundred and twenty years" as God's granting a life span of 120 years to Man. But this just does not make sense. If the text dealt with God's intent to destroy Mankind, why would he in the same breath offer Man long life? And we find that no sooner had the Deluge subsided than Noah lived far longer than the supposed limit of 120 years, as did his descendants Shem (600), Arpakhshad (438), Shelah (433), and so on. In seeking to apply the span of 120 years to Man, the scholars ignore the fact that the biblical language employs not the future tense - "His days shall be" - but the past tense - "And his days were one hundred and twenty years." The obvious question, then, is: Whose time span is referred to here?
Our conclusion is that the count of 120 years was meant to apply to the Deity.
Setting a momentous event in its proper time perspective is a common feature of the Sumerian and Babylonian epic texts. The "Epic of Creation" opens with the words Enuma elish ("when on high"). The story of the encounter of the god Enlil and the goddess Ninlil is placed at the time "when man had not yet been created," and so on.
The language and purpose of Chapter 6 of Genesis were geared to the same purpose - to put the momentous events of the
great Flood in their proper time perspective. The very first word of the very first verse of Chapter 6 is when:
When the Earthlings
began to increase in number
upon the face of the Earth,
and daughters were born unto them.
This, the narrative continues, was the time when
The sons of the gods saw the daughters of the Earthling that they were compatible; and they took unto themselves wives of
whichever they chose.
It was the time when
The Nefilim were upon the land
in those days, and thereafter too;
when the sons of the gods
cohabited with the Earthling's daughters
and they conceived.
They were the Mighty Ones who are of Olam, the People of the Shem.
It was then, in those days, at that time that Man was about to be wiped off the face of the Earth by the Flood. When exactly was that?
Verse 3 tells us unequivocally: when his, the Deity's count, was 120 years. One hundred twenty "years," not of Man and not of Earth, but as counted by the mighty ones, the "People of the Rockets," the Nefilim. And their year was the shar - 3,600 Earth years.
This interpretation not only clarifies the perplexing verses of Genesis 6, it also shows how the verses match the Sumerian information: 120 shar's, 432,000 Earth years, had passed between the Nefilim's first landing on Earth and the Deluge. Based on our estimates of when the Deluge occurred, we place the first landing of the Nefilim on Earth circa 450,000 years ago. Before we turn to the ancient records regarding the voyages of the Nefilim to Earth and their settlement on Earth, two basic questions need to be answered: Could beings obviously not much different from us evolve on another planet? Could such beings have had the capability, half a million years ago, for interplanetary travel?
The first question touches upon a more fundamental question: Is there life as we know it anywhere besides the planet Earth? Scientists now know that there are innumerable galaxies like ours, containing countless stars like our Sun, with astronomical numbers of planets providing every imaginable combination of temperature and atmosphere and chemicals, offering billions of chances for Life.
They have also found that our own interplanetary space is not void. For example, there are water molecules in space, the remnants of what are believed to have been clouds of ice crystals that apparently envelop stars in their early stages of development. This discovery lends support to persistent Mesopotamian references to the waters of the Sun, which mingled with the waters of Tiamat.