Sumerian Tablets Quotes

We’re looking for anything to do with the Rod of Time. (Sin) Rod of Time, Forsaken Moon, Tablet of Destiny…you Sumerians really liked your hokey terms, huh? (Kat) They didn’t exactly ask my opinion before they named them. (Sin) Good, ‘cause my estimation of your intellect would be seriously scarred if they had. (Kat)

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

Having to accept hominoids as real will require having to acknowledge that the prehuman fossil record is comprised entirely of their bones, rather than ours.

According to the English scholar Richard Lloyd-Jones, some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young.

What we finally do, out of desperation ... is go on an impossible, or even forbidden, journey or pilgrimage, which from a rational point of view is futile: to find the one wise man, whomever or wherever he may be; and to find from him the secret of eternal life or the secret of adjusting to this life as best we can.

Sumerian scribes invented the practice of writing in cuneiform on clay tablets sometime around 3400 B.C. in the Uruk/Warka region in the south of ancient Iraq. [The etymology of 'Iraq' may come from this region, biblical Erech. Medieval Arabic sources used the name 'Iraq' as a geographical term for the area in the south and center of the modern republic.]

Eventually, computers might outperform humans in the very fields that made Homo sapiens the ruler of the world: intelligence and communication. The process that began in the Euphrates valley 5,000 years ago, when Sumerian geeks outsourced data-processing from the human brain to a clay tablet, would culminate in Silicon Valley with the victory of the tablet. Humans might still be around, but they would no longer be able to make sense of the world. The new ruler of the world would be a long line of zeros and ones.

I went in and sat down, and my teacher read my tablet. He said, ‘There’s something missing!’ And he caned me. One of the people in charge said, ‘Why did you open your mouth without my permission?’ And he caned me. The one in charge of rules said, ‘Why did you get up without my permission?’ And he caned me. The gatekeeper said, ‘Why are you going out without my permission?’ And he caned me. The keeper of the beer jug said, ‘Why did you get some without my permission?’ And he caned me. The Sumerian teacher said, ‘Why did you speak Akkadian?’* And he caned me. My teacher said, ‘Your handwriting is no good!’ And he caned me.

The Sumerian writing system did so by combining two types of signs, which were pressed in clay tablets. One type of signs represented numbers. There were signs for 1, 10, 60, 600, 3,600 and 36,000. (The Sumerians used a combination of base-6 and base-10 numeral systems. Their base-6 system bestowed on us several important legacies, such as the division of the day into twenty-four hours and of the circle into 360 degrees.) The other type of signs represented people, animals, merchandise, territories, dates and so forth. By combining both types of signs the Sumerians were able to preserve far more data than any human brain could remember or any DNA chain could encode.

A writing exercise from a school in ancient Mesopotamia discovered by modern archaeologists gives us a glimpse into the lives of these students, some 4,000 years ago: I went in and sat down, and my teacher read my tablet. He said, ‘There’s something missing!’ And he caned me. One of the people in charge said, ‘Why did you open your mouth without my permission?’ And he caned me. The one in charge of rules said, ‘Why did you get up without my permission?’ And he caned me. The gatekeeper said, ‘Why are you going out without my permission?’ And he caned me. The keeper of the beer jug said, ‘Why did you get some without my permission?’ And he caned me. The Sumerian teacher said, ‘Why did you speak Akkadian?’* And he caned me. My teacher said, ‘Your handwriting is no good!’ And he caned me.4

A writing exercise from a school in ancient Mesopotamia discovered by modern archaeologists gives us a glimpse into the lives of these students, some 4,000 years ago: I went in and sat down, and my teacher read my tablet. He said, ‘There’s something missing!’ And he caned me. One of the people in charge said, ‘Why did you open your mouth without my permission?’ And he caned me. The one in charge of rules said, ‘Why did you get up without my permission?’ And he caned me. The gatekeeper said, ‘Why are you going out without my permission?’ And he caned me. The keeper of the beer jug said, ‘Why did you get some without my permission?’ And he caned me. The Sumerian teacher said, ‘Why did you speak Akkadian?’fn1 And he caned me. My teacher said, ‘Your handwriting is no good!’ And he caned me.4

Similar declarations are to be found again and again, in Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian records, and always with the same theme: the restoration of “justice and equity,” the protection of widows and orphans, to ensure—as Hammurabi was to put it when he abolished debts in Babylon in 1761 BC—“that the strong might not oppress the weak.”14 In the words of Michael Hudson, The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia’s financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of “breaking the tablets,” that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of justice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fair rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rejoin their families. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mortgage liens had accumulated.15

Sumerian culture -- the society based on me -- was another manifestation of the metavirus. Except that in this case, it was in a linguistic form rather than DNA." "Excuse me," Mr. Lee says. "You are saying that civilization started out as an infection?" "Civilization in its primitive form, yes. Each me was a sort of virus, kicked out by the metavirus principle. Take the example of the bread-baking me. Once that me got into society, it was a self-sustaining piece of information. It's a simple question of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will live better and be more apt to reproduce than people who don't know how. Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-replicating piece of information. That makes it a virus. Sumerian culture -- with its temples full of me -- was just a collection of successful viruses that had accumulated over the millennia. It was a franchise operation, except it had ziggurats instead of golden arches, and clay tablets instead of three-ring binders. "The Sumerian word for 'mind,' or 'wisdom,' is identical to the word for 'ear.' That's all those people were: ears with bodies attached. Passive receivers of information. But Enki was different. Enki was an en who just happened to be especially good at his job. He had the unusual ability to write new me -- he was a hacker. He was, actually, the first modern man, a fully conscious human being, just like us. "At some point, Enki realized that Sumer was stuck in a rut. People were carrying out the same old me all the time, not coming up with new ones, not thinking for themselves. I suspect that he was lonely, being one of the few -- perhaps the only -- conscious human being in the world. He realized that in order for the human race to advance, they had to be delivered from the grip of this viral civilization. "So he created the nam-shub of Enki, a countervirus that spread along the same routes as the me and the metavirus. It went into the deep structures of the brain and reprogrammed them. Henceforth, no one could understand the Sumerian language, or any other deep structure-based language. Cut off from our common deep structures, we began to develop new languages that had nothing in common with each other. The me no longer worked and it was not possible to write new me. Further transmission of the metavirus was blocked." "Why didn't everyone starve from lack of bread, having lost the bread-making me?" Uncle Enzo says. "Some probably did. Everyone else had to use their higher brains and figure it out. So you might say that the nam-shub of Enki was the beginnings of human consciousness -- when we first had to think for ourselves. It was the beginning of rational religion, too, the first time that people began to think about abstract issues like God and Good and Evil. That's where the name Babel comes from. Literally it means 'Gate of God.' It was the gate that allowed God to reach the human race. Babel is a gateway in our minds, a gateway that was opened by the nam-shub of Enki that broke us free from the metavirus and gave us the ability to think -- moved us from a materialistic world to a dualistic world -- a binary world -- with both a physical and a spiritual component.

Money has always been a tool used to control the people. It did not evolve from thousands of years of barter and trade like we are led to believe; the priest-kings of ancient Sumer first introduced it. Written in the Sumerian tablets (the oldest written and deciphered record of human history), is a financial transaction of depositing silver shekels at the palace temple. It is one of the earliest examples of a “Bill of Exchange” used by modern banks, and tells us that temples in antiquity served as the first banks, creating a link between bankers and royal bloodlines as far back as we can trace.

Line 10: The fact that the inhabitants of the Netherworld are said to be clad in feather garments is perhaps due to the belief that after death, a person's soul turned into a spirit or a ghost, whose nature was wind-like, as well as bird-like. The Mesopotamians believed in the body (*pagru*) and the soul. the latter being referred to by two words: GIDIM = *et.emmu*, meaning "spirit of the dead," "ghost;" and AN.ZAG.GAR(.RA)/LIL2 = *zaqi_qu*/*ziqi_qu*, meaning "soul," "ghost," "phantom." Living beings (humans and animals) also had ZI (*napis\/tu*) "life, vigor, breath," which was associated with the throat or neck. As breath and coming from one's throat, ZI was understood as moving air, i.e., wind-like. ZI (*napis\/tu*) was the animating life force, which could be shortened or prolonged. For instance...Inanna grants "long life (zi-su\-ud-g~a/l) under him (=the king) in the palace. At one's death, when the soul/spirit released itself from the body, both *et.emmu* and *zaqi_qu*/*ziqi_qu* descended to the Netherworld, but when the body ceased to exist, so did the *et.emmu*, leaving only the *zaqi_gu*. Those souls that were denied access to the Netherworld for whatever reason, such as improper buriel or violent or premature death, roamed as harmful ghosts. Those souls who had attained peace were occasionally allowed to visit their families, to offer help or give instructions to their still living relatives. As it was only the *et.emmu* that was able to have influence on the affairs of the living relatives, special care was taken to preserve the remains of the familial dead. According to CAD [The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago] the Sumerian equivalent of *zaqi_qu*/*ziqi_qu* was li/l, which referred to a "phantom," "ghost," "haunting spirit" as in lu/-li/l-la/ [or] *lilu^* or in ki-sikil-li/l - la/ {or] *lili_tu*. the usual translation for the word li/l, however, is "wind," and li/l is equated with the word *s\/a_ru* (wind) in lexical lists. As the lexical lists equate wind (*s\/a_ru* and ghost (*zaqi_qu*) their association with each other cannot be unfounded. Moreover, *zaqi_qu* derives from the same root as the verb *za^qu*, "to blow," and the noun *zi_qu*, "breeze." According to J. Scurlock, *zaqi_qu* is a sexless, wind-like emanation, probably a bird-like phantom, able to fly through small apertures, and as such, became associated with dreaming, as it was able to leave the sleeping body. The wind-like appearance of the soul is also attested in the Gilgamesh Epic XII 83-84, where Enkidu is able to ascend from the Netherworld through a hole in the ground: "[Gilgamesh] opened a hole in the Netherworld, the *utukku* (ghost) of Enkidu came forthfrom the underworld as a *zaqi_qu." The soul's bird-like appearance is referred to in Tablet VII 183-184, where Enkidu visits the Netherworld in a dream. Prior to his descent, he is changed into a dove, and his hands are changed into wings. - State Archives of Assyria Cuneiform Texts Volume VI: The Neo-Assyrian Myth of Istar's Descent and Resurrection {In this quote I haven't been able to copy some words exactly. I've put Assyrian words( normally in italics) between *asterisks*. The names of signs in Sumerian cuneiform (wedge-shaped writing) are normally in CAPITALS with a number slightly below the line after it if there's more than one reading for that sign. Assyriologists use marks above or below individual letters to aid pronunciation- I've put whatever I can do similar after the letter. E.g. *et.emmu" normally has the dot under the "t" to indicate a sibilant or buzzy sound, so it sounds something like "etzzemmoo." *zaqi_qu* normally has the line (macron) over the "i" to indicate a long vowel, so it sounds like "zaqeeqoo." *napis\/tu* normally has a small "v" over the s to make a sh sound, ="napishtu".}

The Sumerian Tablets speak of King Sargon the Elder being found as a baby floating in a basket on the river and brought up by a royal family. Exodus speaks of Moses being found as a baby floating in a basket on the river by a royal princess and how he was brought up by the Egyptian royal family. The list of such ‘coincidences’ goes on and on.

The Tablets describe how the genes of the Annunaki and those of the native humans were combined in a test tube to create the ‘updated’ human capable of doing the tasks the Anunnaki required. The idea of test tube babies would have sounded ridiculous when the tablets were found in 1850, but that is precisely what scientists are now able to do. Again and again modern research supports the themes of the Sumerian Tablets.

About 35,000 years ago came another sudden upgrade and the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens, the physical form we see today. The Sumerian Tablets name the two people involved in the creation of the slave race. They were the chief scientist called Enki, Lord of the Earth (Ki=Earth) and Ninkharsag, also known as Ninti (Lady Life) because of her expertise in medicine. She was later referred to as Mammi, from which comes mama and mother.

About 35,000 years ago came another sudden upgrade and the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens, the physical form we see today. The Sumerian Tablets name the two people involved in the creation of the slave race. They were the chief scientist called Enki, Lord of the Earth (Ki=Earth) and Ninkharsag, also known as Ninti (Lady Life) because of her expertise in medicine. She was later referred to as Mammi, from which comes mama and mother. Ninkharsag

About 35,000 years ago came another sudden upgrade and the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens, the physical form we see today. The Sumerian Tablets name the two people involved in the creation of the slave race. They were the chief scientist called Enki, Lord of the Earth (Ki=Earth) and Ninkharsag, also known as Ninti (Lady Life) because of her expertise in medicine. She was later referred to as Mammi, from which comes mama and mother. Ninkharsag is symbolised in Mesopotamian depictions by a tool used to cut the umbilical cord. It is shaped like a horseshoe and was used in ancient times. She also became the mother goddess of a stream of religions under names like Queen Semiramis, Isis, Barati, Diana, Mary and many others, which emerged from the legends of this all over the world. She is often depicted as a pregnant woman. The texts say of the Anunnaki leadership:

information we have comes from Sumerian sources such as the King List, a cuneiform tablet discovered by archeologists

Because many of the tablets on which they wrote have survived and have been deciphered,

A class of people who worked for the temple (which functioned as a proto–city hall) figured out how to keep track of stuff by elaborating on the tokens-pressed-in-clay system. They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants. For a long time, that’s all writing was. No love notes. No eulogies. No stories. Just IOU six sheep. Or, as a tablet from a famous mound in a Sumerian city called Uruk, in present-day Iraq, said: “Lu-Nanna, the head of the temple, received one cow and its two young suckling bull calves from the royal delivery from [a guy named] Abasaga.

A class of people who worked for the temple (which functioned as a proto–city hall) figured out how to keep track of stuff by elaborating on the tokens-pressed-in-clay system. They used a reed stylus to make marks on a little clay tablet and started using abstract symbols for numbers themselves. The first writers weren’t poets; they were accountants. For a long time, that’s all writing was. No love notes. No eulogies. No stories. Just IOU six sheep. Or, as a tablet from a famous mound in a Sumerian city called Uruk, in present-day Iraq, said: “Lu-Nanna, the head of the temple, received one cow and its two young suckling bull calves from the royal delivery from [a guy named] Abasaga.” Silver—a metal people had used previously for jewelry and rituals—was desirable and scarce and easy to store and divide, and it became money-ish in Mesopotamia, but for lots of people—maybe most people—money still wasn’t a thing.

First came Sumer with its amazing ziggurats, agriculture (they had four types of beer!), and written language. The Sumerian cuneiform tablets, more than half a million still cached away in museums across the world, state that civilization was brought to them by beings who could fly through the air. These god-like beings were called the Anunnaki, translated as “those who came from the heavens to the Earth.

Zeus…,” Langdon declared, his voice powerful. “The god of all gods. The most feared and revered of all the pagan deities. Zeus, more than any other god, resisted his own extinction, mounting a violent battle against the dying of his own light, precisely as had the earlier gods Zeus had replaced.” On the ceiling flashed images of Stonehenge, the Sumerian cuneiform tablets, and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Then Zeus’s bust returned. “Zeus’s followers were so resistant to giving up on their god that the conquering faith of Christianity had no choice but to adopt the face of Zeus as the face of their new God.” On the ceiling, the bearded bust of Zeus dissolved seamlessly into a fresco of an identical bearded face—that of the Christian God as depicted in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

the tablets describe how the Anunnaki came from a planet called Nibiru (The Planet of the Crossing) which he believes has a 3,600 year elliptical orbit that takes it between Jupiter and Mars and then out into far space beyond Pluto. Sitchin says that the Sumerians called this planet Tiamat, or the Water Monster. He says that it was debris from Tiamat’s collision with the Nibiru moon which created the Great Band Bracelet – the asteroid belt which is found between Mars and Jupiter. What remained of Tiamat was thrown into another orbit, Sitchin’s translations claim, and eventually it became the Earth

The Tablets describe the nature and colour of Neptune and Uranus in ways that have only been confirmed in the last few years! What’s more, the modern ‘experts’ did not expect those planets to look as they did, yet the Sumerians knew thousands of years BC what our ‘advanced’ science has only just discovered.

Most stunning about the Sumerian Tablets is the way they describe the creation of homo sapiens. Sitchin says the Anunnaki came to the Earth an estimated 450,000 years ago to mine gold in what is now Africa. The main mining centre was in today’s Zimbabwe, an area the Sumerians called AB.ZU (deep deposit), he claims. Studies by the Anglo-American Corporation have found extensive evidence of gold mining in Africa at least 60,000 years ago, probably 100,000.3

The Sumerian tablets speak of E.DIN (The Abode of the Righteous Ones).

The Sumerian tablets speak of E.DIN (The Abode of the Righteous Ones). This connects with the Sumerian name for their gods, DIN.GIR (the Righteous Ones of the Rockets). So the Sumerians spoke of Edin and Genesis speaks of the Garden of Eden. This was a centre for the gods, the Anunnaki.

From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have “published” at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies, 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films, and 60 trillion public web pages.

The word “algorithm” comes from the name of Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of a ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. (His book was called al-Jabr wa’l-Muqābala—and the “al-jabr” of the title in turn provides the source of our word “algebra.”) The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī’s work: a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.

also wish to express my thanks to the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Turkey and to the Director of the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul for generously making it possible for me to utilize the Sumerian literary tablets in the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient. To the two curators of the tablet collection of this museum, Muazzez cik and Hatice Kizilyay, I am particularly

Once, he showed me a picture of an ancient clay tablet, Babylonian or Sumerian, something like that, 4,000 years old. I expected it to be something holy, a poem to a fertility goddess, some ancient fable. But it was, Cyrus told me, just a lengthy complaint from a business transaction about receiving the wrong kind of copper. “The copper is substandard. I have been treated rudely. I have not accepted the copper, but I paid money for it.” I never forgot that. Cyrus was laughing of course, he thought it was hilarious. “Ancient one-star review!” he said.