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Not sure what the blog rules are, as I never posted on one before. But thanks for the ping. Trust this will end up as a treasure trove for all of us who are still interested in the origins of man and creation in general.

While I am here, may I mention "The Lost Book of Enki,' by Zecharia Sitchin. The Memoirs and Prophecies of an Extraterrestrial God. (Fiction/Mythology) I think it is his latest book. It is written as prose and attempts to portray the key points of his research in a highly condensed chronology covering his entire works -- and what I think is a creative piece of writing, but alas, I fear, one that only a Sitchin fan would enjoy.

Connects some dots, expands the archeological/astro-archeological playing fields, and if nothing else, is great science-fiction. I've read all of the Sitchin material several times and it currently serves as my ancient world view, subject to alteration and modification, of course, as a proper response to the continuing stream of new evidence which confirms or disputes any aspect of the material.

Sorry if this is not appropriate for your blog. In which case, please delete. Thanks again and please keep me on your ping list.

[see also Eastbound's post at the in reply to link; I didn't ping EB because it's a big post and EB's post is from a while back]

The Olmec Enigma
by Zecharia Sitchin
Once it was conceded (very grudgingly!) that the 'Olmecs' did indeed represent the earliest or even Mother Civilization of Mesoamerica, the date of their arrival was at first set at about 250 B.C.; then at about 500 B.C.; then farther back and back, until 1500 B.C. was acknowledged. My conclusion that the Olmec presence in the New World went back at least 5,000 years, to circa 3000 B.C., was reached by many paths. The first one was an attempt to identify the great god of Mesoamerica, the Winged Serpent (Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs, Kukulkan to the Mayas), and the significance of his promise to return to those lands on the first day of a 52-year cycle, (AD 1519, when the Aztec king Montezuma believed that the appearance of the Spanish conquistador Cortez was such a Return, coincided with the anticipated sacred date).

Reproduction is permitted if accompanied by the statement:

© Z. Sitchin 2001
Reproduced by permission.

Sitchin was a follower of Immanuel Velikovsky. Later he came up with his The Twelfth Planet which was reviewed twice in issue IV:4 of KRONOS, the first by Roger Wescott, the other by C. Leroy Ellenberger.

The Pitfalls of Radiocarbon Dating
by Immanuel Velikovsky
(originally published in Pensee issue 4 in 1973)
The Mexicologist, Professor George Kubler of Yale, stressed that certain traditions contained in Mesoamerican heritage were referred by me to events of the pre-Christian era. Kubler insisted that this heritage could not date from the 8th to 4th pre-Christian centuries, but rather was generated in the 4th to 8th century of the Christian era. But in December, 1956, the National Geographical Society in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution made it known that excavations at LaVenta proved by radiocarbon that the classical period of the Meso-American civilizations (Olmec, Toltec, Maya, etc.) needs to be pushed back by a full thousand years and ascribed not to the 4th to 8th centuries of the Christian era but to the 8th to 4th centuries before that era.

In April 1967 the Yale Scientific Magazine published "Venus -- a Youthful Planet" by I.V. (written in 1963), in which Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan, "the Morning-Evening Star of the Mayas, Olmecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs" is mentioned. The article was reprinted in KRONOS IV:3 in February 1979.

In 1966, in the book The Velikovsky Affair, I.V. noted that the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society published the scientific dates for artifacts excavated at La Venta -- 800 to 400 BC -- in 1956, twenty years before SItchin scribbled his drivel, and even this chapter by I.V. was ten years ahead of Sitchin.

And of course, the Mesoamerican civilizations are mentioned a number of times in Worlds In Collision -- published in 1950 -- including in the chapter "The Fifty-two Year Period" (begins p 153).

UFO: The Science and Phenomena Magazine for June/July 2003 has an article by Charles Ginenthal, "Immanuel Velikovsky Revisited", and an interview conducted by Don Ecker, "Zecharia Sitchin on Immanuel Velikovsky". Ginenthal is author of several books on Velikovsky and editor of The Velikovskian.

The Sitchin interview is a hoot. Sitchin claims that he was researching ancient times back when Worlds In Collision first came out, and that his daughter had given him the book for his birthday. That would make Sitchin between 80 and 90 years old, estimating that his daughter was at least ten in 1950 (that's when WiC was first published), and that she was born when Sitchin was 20 years old.

Sitchin also claims that Velikovsky "did not mention, even once, Sumer or the Sumerians in his writings. I do not know how he missed it, unless he found it contradicted his work."

The fact is, Velikovsky mentions Sumer, Sumerians, and/or the Sumerian culture or written records at least five times in three of his published books, once in Harpers (1951), and in Pensee'. This is an example of Sitchin saying more than he knows, or perhaps it's merely a fabrication.

Sitchin also spouts his usual mumbo-jumbo about the significance of certain Mesopotamian customs and his view of their origin. The fact is, Sitchin's claim that the Earth originated in a collision (3.9 billion years ago, according to Sitchin in this interview) between two bodies, at least one of which no longer exists, isn't supported by Sumerian legend. Period. There's simply nothing of the kind in surviving Sumerian legend.

There's also nothing to his claim of a planet on an eccentric, 3600 year long orbit around the Sun. There is no such planet. As the former Velikovsky supporter, C. Leroy Ellenberger pointed out in his contemporary review (KRONOS Vol. 4:4) of Sitchin's first cult classic, The Twelfth Planet, the orbital characteristics Sitchin claims are given by the Sumerian records aren't consistent with laws of planetary motion.

Ellenberger also pointed out that in The Twelfth Planet Sitchin claims that the planet Marduk passed through in 3800 BC, but with a 3600 year orbital period, there must have been a passage in 200 BC, which Sitchin doesn't mention. In the same issue, Roger Wescott also reviews The Twelfth Planet and quotes from it: "all the ancient languages . . . including early Chinese . . . stemmed from one primeval source -- Sumerian." Wescott then points out that Sumerian has no known linguistic relatives, living or dead.