THE CASE OF THE EVIL WIND

Climate Study Corroborates Sumer’s Nuclear Fate

At the end of the third millennium B.C. the great Sumerian civilization came to an abrupt end.  Its sudden demise was bewailed in numerous lamentation texts that have been discovered by archeologists. The texts ascribed the calamity to an Evil Wind that came blowing from the west (from the direction of the Mediterranean Sea) -- a deathly cloud that caused excruciating death to all living beings, people and animals alike, that withered plants and poisoned the waters.

In The Wars of Gods and Men (third book of The Earth Chronicles series), Zecharia Sitchin saw an explanation of the sudden death in a long text known to scholars as The Erra Epos, that described a chain of events that ultimately led to the use of "Weapons of Terror" in a conflict between opposing clans of the Anunnaki ("Those who from Heaven to Earth came").

Based on the descriptions of the weapons in the Erra Epos­ and in the lamentation texts, Zecharia Sitchin concluded that the Weapons of Terror were nuclear weapons. Used to obliterate the spaceport that then existed in the Sinai Peninsula (and some "sinning cities" such as Sodom and Gomorrah), the nuclear cloud then was carried by the prevailing winds eastward, causing death and desolation in the Lands Between the Rivers (Mesopotamia) -- the empire of Sumer and Akkad.

Besides claiming that nuclear weapons were first used on Earth not in the 1940’s in Hiroshima but thousands of years earlier in the Near East, Zecharia also pinpointed the date: 2024 B.C.!

Scientific Corroboration Now Comes Along

That the civilization that sprang out in Sumer circa 3800 B.C. – reaching unparalleled heights under the last dynasty, the Third Dynasty of Ur (Abraham’s city) -- had come to an abrupt end near the end of the third millennium B.C. has been an accepted and well documented fact. That the end was abrupt, was also certain.   What scholars deemed as still lacking was an explanation: How,­ what caused it?

Beginning in 1999, archaeologists and scholars specializing in the Near East saw mounting evidence that the demise of Sumer and Akkad (Sumer’s northern extension) coincided with an abrupt climate change. An initial study by Harvey Weiss and Timothy C. Wieskel of Harvard University was reinforced by a subsequent study (Geology, April 2000) by H.M. Cullen et al from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, the University of Utah, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Institute fÜr Geowissenschaften, Germany.  Based on studies of unexplained aridity and wind-blown dust storms and radiocarbon datings, they reported that their readings indicated a date of 4025 years ago (plus or minus a margin of 125 years).

A precise date corroborated!

Those and similar climate-change studies, relating the climate conditions to the rise and fall of civilizations in the Old as well as the New Worlds, were summed up in a major study published in the prestigious journal Science in its 27 April 2001 issue.  Authored by Peter B. deMenocal of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, the study paid particular attention to sedimentary remains of Tephra; the telltale rock fragments confirmed the date 4025 Years Before Present. 

And 4025 years, before the present year A.D. 2001 -- is exactly 2024 B.C., as Zecharia Sitchin had determined in his 1985 book!

The Tephra Mystery

The reliance of this latest study on the Tephra evidence is doubly significant.

While the previous studies spoke of “wind blown dust,” this latest study focuses on a material called Tephra.  And what is Tephra? It is defined in geology textbooks thus:

When a volcano erupts, it will sometimes eject material such as rock fragments into the atmosphere.  This material is known as Tephra

These burnt-through pieces of blackened gravel-like rock mostly fall near their volcanic source; but ashlike particles can be carried by prevailing winds over many miles and can stay aloft for more than a year.

The area in the Sinai Peninsula where the destroyed spaceport had been is indeed covered -- to this day! -- with gravelike burnt-through blackened stones (for photo evidence see illustrations 105, 106, & 107 in The Wars of Gods and Men).  But as Zecharia has pointed out in his book; there are NO VOLCANOES in the Sinai Peninsula.  In the Sinai Peninsula, the source of the wind-carried dust remains a mystery.

And the only explanation for these broken and blackened stones in the Sinai and the windblown desolation in Mesopotamia can be the tale of the Erra Epos, (reflected in the biblical tale of the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah):  not an eruption by a non-existent volcano, but the use of nuclear weapons in 2024 B.C.

ZS / November 2001

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