G   I   L   G   A   M   E   S   H

"The Landing Place"

from "The Twelfth Planet" by Zecharia Sitchin

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The name of an ancient site – Ba’albek in Lebanon – has now been mentioned in dispatches by war correspondents covering the latest flareup in the Middle East.  Israeli planes have been dropping bombs there on training and supply encampments of Hezbollah terrorists, in a tit-for-tat for the latter’s missile attacks on Israel. Some of the dispatches refer to the town’s “Roman ruins” - remains of temples that Roman emperors erected in honor of Rome’s gods; but little, if any, mention is made of the place’s earlier and much more significant archaeological remains.

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I and those who have been with me to the place several years ago can attest that the “Roman ruins” are indeed imposing remains of three magnificent temples, including the largest temple to Jupiter anywhere in the Roman empire, Rome itself included - as an artist’s reconstruction shows (Fig. 1 above).  But the Romans came there because the place had been revered earlier by the Greeks.  Pompey, Rome’s conquering general, offered there sacrifices in 60 B.C. imitating Alexander the Great who paid there homage to Zeus centuries earlier.  The Greeks came because the place was deemed a unique sacred site by the Phoenicians and the Babylonians before them; and before all those generals and emperors and kings, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in ancient Sumer, went there circa 2900 B.C. to obtain immortality from the gods.

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Having been the son of the goddess Ninsun and the high priest of Uruk,  Gilgamesh was considered not just a demigod but  “two thirds divine.”  This, he asserted, entitled him to avoid the death of a mortal. Yes, his mother told him - but to attain our longevity you have to go to our planet, Nibiru (where one year equals 3,600 Earth-years).  So Gilgamesh journeyed from Sumer (now southern Iraq) to ‘The Landing Place” in the cedar mountains where the rocketships of the gods were lofted.

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The Epic of Gilgamesh, a text found inscribed on clay tablets, actually describes how Gilgamesh witnessed a rocketship being launched from the Landing Place. A later Phoenician coin depicted such a rocket standing on a launching pad (Fig. 2 above). As this depiction shows, the launch facility was located on a great platform; and indeed, the truly ancient site of Baalbek encompassed a paved stone platform of about five million square feet.

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