The death of Zecharia Sitchin has thrown into consternation thousands of his readers around the world. Yet the Azerbaijani sumerologist continues to live in what he left us as a legacy: in his numerous writings, in his studies on ancient Annunaki extraterrestrial visitors, in his interviews, in his incredible theories and above all in the search for the mysterious tenth planet: Nibiru ...
Pablo Ayo
He looked like a fairy tale character, one of those good-looking old men always intent on building strange contraptions or pondering something fantastic. Like a modern master Geppetto, or like Professor Albus Dumbledore, despite his age, Zecharia Sitchin spent hours and hours in his studio every day, working on his theories and developing new projects, always relating to the reinterpretation of ancient Sumerian myths (and not only) in a UFO key.
In some strange way, the same physical figure of Sitchin, small, with a little bacon, always bent over his work, with that good-natured smile sticking out from under his white mustache and a sharp and amused look that flashed every now and then from behind his glasses, ended up conditioning people - myself included - to imagine Sitchin relegated to a sort of timeless fantasy world, as if he were a kind of Santa Claus who lived happily in his North Pole of pure research. To such an extent that no one seemed to consider even remotely possible his departure. Sitchin himself seemed to be observing his medical problems with good-natured indifference. In a note posted by him personally on his website last summer, he said: "Saturday 25 June I was rushed to the hospital for acute abdominal pain. I was hospitalized and after a short rehabilitation I was discharged and am home again. After a short rest I hope to be able to return as soon as possible to fully work on my latest book, and on the 'Genome Project of the Goddess of Ur' ".
Of course, his optimism was also ours: despite the large amount of books written over decades on the UFO rereading of ancient Sumerian texts, which some might define as more than exhaustive, there were several new projects towards which Sitchin was reaching out, not least his challenge to the Natural History Museum in London concerning the remains of a Sumerian woman from over 4,500 years ago: he was convinced that an analysis of the woman's DNA could reveal non-human genetic traces. Forensic experts at the Natural History Museum in London have determined that Queen Puabi, found in Iraq and dead at about 40, likely reigned as queen during the First Dynasty of Ur. Sitchin argues that she was more than a queen, that is, a "nin", a Sumerian word that translated means "goddess". "Perhaps by comparing her genome with ours, we would discover those missing genes that they deliberately did not want to give us." Sitchin said. But if it is true that, when you do something that interests you, time passes without us realizing it, for him it has flown. Just three months after the hospitalization we talked about, Sitchin had a relapse. We have no details on the disease, and perhaps they are not even necessary. What matters is that towards the end of October, the professor's relatives announced his death in New York on the morning of October 9, 2010, asking his many fans around the world to respect their pain and to contact them for the condolences only by email. Those who still wish to do so can write to relatives at tributes@sitchin.com
«Perhaps, by comparing the Queen Puabi of Ur genome with ours, we would discover those missing genes that they deliberately did not want to give us» Sitchin said.
Zecharia Sitchin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1920. He later moved to Palestine, where he learned ancient and modern Hebrew and other European and Semitic languages. There he also studied the Old Testament and the archeology of the Near East. After graduating from London University with a degree in economic history, he returned to Israel where he worked for some time as a journalist and editor, before moving to New York in 1952, where he lived the rest of his life. He was a shipping company executive for many years with his wife, who died in 2007, and had two daughters. He then spent his free time studying, traveling to ancient archaeological sites and spreading his incredible theories. New York's Upper West Side and Broadway were fabulous places for Sitchin: he spent hours researching the New York Public Library on 42nd Street and the archives of Broadway's Jewish Theological Semnary on 122nd Street. An authentic mine from which to draw information and develop new theories.
"If I lived in Florida, and I didn't have a car, I'd be dead already," he once said. He hated the very American idea of retiring to Florida, where good weather is a blessing against rheumatism and absolute relaxation is in force. Like Woody Allen, the old professor had now become one with his beloved and dynamic New York. “I've been all over the Western world and I don't know of any other place in the world where an elderly person like me could survive on their own. I raise my hand, my car arrives (a taxi, ed.) And takes me where I want. I can make a phone call to any restaurant or shop and get what I need in minutes. '
His day was marked by precise rhythms: he always worked on some books, answered fan letters, but if the world fell at noon he would take his cane, put on his hat and coat, go down the elevator to the ground floor, call a taxi and took him to Cafe Eighty Two on Broadway, where he ate lunch, usually with a few friends his age. We like to imagine him still there, eating something hot on a winter's day, joking and talking with his old companions.
Prolific author and tireless researcher
Sitchin has written an astonishing number of books on mysterious archeology, and he is the one who made famous the issue about the Anunnaki and the twelfth planet, Nibiru. His detractors (as well as fellow Sumerologists and academics) accused him of giving a too imaginative and unscientific interpretation of some Sumerian tablets, for some time now cataloged and interpreted in a very different way from how Sitchin did. According to the professor, the Sumerian civilization, one of the earliest and most important on Earth, was created and then influenced by a race of alien colonizers, called Anunnaki, from the planet Nibiru, a hypothetical 10th planet of the solar system (twelfth if yes they also consider the Moon and the Sun as planets, as the ancients did), invisible to us due to its very long period of revolution around the sun: about 3600 years.
According to when Sitchin wrote both in his 1976 bestseller "The Twelfth Planet" (now in its 45th reprint) and in subsequent books, this planet Nibiru was home to a race of technologically advanced and humanoid-looking extraterrestrials called the Anunnaki. During a moment of approach to Earth that occurred 450,000 years ago, they descended on our planet in spaceships in search of minerals, especially gold, which they found in some mines in Africa. Of course, even among the Anunnaki there were social differences, and soon the alien miners complained to their bosses about the exhausting working conditions, even going so far as to revolt against the commanders of the expedition. To resolve the situation, the Anunnaki geneticists took some specimens of homo erectus and mixed their stellar DNA with that of primitive humans, in order to create a race of slaves that would do the hard work in the mines for them. Of course things got spoiled there too in the end, as some Anunnaki began to mate with humans and consider them more than just slaves ...
Another of Sitchin's theories concerned the fact that during one of the ancient "wars between gods" nuclear weapons were probably used, such as the one called the "evil wind" in the ancient song "The lament of UR", which described precisely the destruction of the city of Ur which occurred around 2000 b.C. Sitchin further stated that the biblical texts as we know them derive in large part from the earliest Sumerian texts. This last statement by Sitchin is generally believed to be credible even by many archaeologists and historians, the problem that arises, however, is a religious one. To situate the origin of biblical texts outside the Jewish culture is, in short, an affront to the more conservative Jewish religious tradition.
Sitchin himself in his life had many problems within the Jewish community to which he belonged, and not infrequently he had to emphasize how he made a precise distinction between his research and his faith. The problem was that to affirm the existence of a parallelism between the Sumerian and the Hebrew texts was a bit like saying that the biblical Yahweh could perhaps have been an extraterrestrial visitor (or more than one, if we interpret some passages of the Bible in which God calls himself "the Elohim"). The Italian researcher Mauro Biglino, in his book The book that will forever change our ideas about the Bible, outlined this theory very clearly, which if confirmed would throw the religious world into chaos, given that the Old Testament is sacred not only for Catholics and Jews but also for Muslims.
For this reason, Sitchin has always kept out of the religious dispute, secretly stating that there were parallels, but he has always been careful not to define Yahweh or the angels of the Old Testament as extraterrestrial visitors. But it is obvious in the end that we are talking about this. Just as it seems that the idea of a possible return of Nibiru, or whatever we want to call the "planet of the gods", would have alarmed the Vatican Observatory so much that it recently built new and more powerful (and expensive) telescopes, all aimed at the stars. The return of our ancient "heavenly" fathers would be read by all the religions of the world as a sort of "Parousia", a messianic return that could herald a fearsome Armageddon, a future cataclysm caused perhaps by the powerful gravitational waves of Nibiru, or more probably from the predictable exchange of nuclear bullets between the terrestrial government and the incoming alien one. The military is known to be suspicious in nature, and would probably take little sympathy for the return of the ancient star masters. On the other hand, even in the film Stargate, largely inspired by Sitchin's books, the first thing the military brought to the alien planet was a nuclear device. But it's all about science fiction, right?
Another of Sitchin's theories concerned the fact that during one of the ancient "wars between gods" nuclear weapons were probably used, such as the one called the "evil wind" in the ancient song "The lament of UR", which described precisely the destruction of the city of Ur which occurred around 2000 b.C.
A taxi to the stars
Sitchin's theories have been famous for years and this is not the most suitable place to talk about them, but we encourage those who still don't know his work to look in the bookstore for some of his numerous and fascinating books. Certainly not all of Sitchin's theories were perfect, even some of his former proteges, such as Alan Alford, criticized him on some points. But it is certain that Zecharia Sitchin was the first to popularize the idea of the ancient Anunnaki astronauts from Nibiru, the tenth planet, worldwide. And if one day we can also improve his theories, and see even further and with greater clarity, it will be only because we have leaned on the shoulders of a giant. Now Zecharia looks at us from above, from those stars that he has pursued all his life, and by now he will have discovered the whole truth about the Planet of the gods. For us, it will take some time.
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