This one is the most bizarre. Is it true that the ancient Sumerians have a story very similar to the Biblical flood story, the main differences being that instead of one god, it describes a sort of "infighting" between different "beings from the sky," some of whom wanted to destroy humans and others who wanted to save them; and that instead of Noah carrying pairs of all animals in his boat, as the later Biblical story describes, he carried the "seed" of such animals in vials on his boat?

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You all are going to think I've fallen off the deep end, but I'm currently reading a book that I thought was about Freemasonry, but is actually about aliens having begun human civilization. Now, I half think this is hilarious, but I can't help wondering about some of the more unbelievable "facts" presented at the end of the book. So I'm going to post several questions based on "facts" presented in the book. Please feel free to give evidence or alternate explanations against these facts, because I really don't want to become a nut who thinks aliens kept humans as slaves, genetically modified us, and mined our planet millions of years ago.

The story of Noah's Ark ; a great flood that covered the Earth but a hero was spared; is not confined to the Bible. It occurs in what here we usually call the Babylonian 'Epic of Gilgamesh'.Sumeria was once conquered by Babylon and the story is often described as from Sumeria.It occurs in verses by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid. It seems likely that it has its roots in some folk memory of a major flood in the Middle East in the very distant past. Not as likely as some fanciful interpretation put on some ordinary folk tale by some such person as Eric von Daniken, though with no knowledge of the original language or the culture, finding something that boring old scholars have unaccountably missed !

A quick check reveals that the two stories have much in common. Both have great floods which destroy the world; both have heros singled out by a god though the one in the Epic seems to have been a lucky man more than a straight choice; both heros have enormous boats and both save their families and two of all creatures. Noah's flood lasts him 40 days the one in the Epic lasts only 6 ( they must have beached on a higher mountain ).

Offhand I can't remember Ovid's Metarmorphoses' version of the wildlife; it certainly has a man and his wife in a boat and surviving a subsiding flood though.Being so very much later it is likely to be Ovid's retelling of the Babylonian version coming down through folklore to where he was.

According to this book (_Rule By Secrecy_ by Jim Marrs... a fairly unconvincing but interesting look into the mind of a conspiracy theorist - except the last few chapters, which as you can see have at least captured my imagination!), the story is found on wet clay tablets written by ancient Sumerians. He writes,

"Virtually nothing was known about the Sumerians until about 150 years ago when archeologists... began to dig into the strange mounds dotting the countryside in southern Iraq... By the late nineteenth century, Sumerian had been recognized as an original language and was being translated. Despite today's knowledge, the general public still has been taught little about this first great human civilization...

"It is fascinating to realize that it may be possible to know more about this six-thousand-year-old civilization than we may ever know about the more recent Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The explanation lies in the Sumerian cuneiform writing. Whereas the papyrus of other elder empires desintegrated over time or were destroyed by the fires of war, cuneiform was etched onto wet clay tablets...[which] were then dried, baked and kept in large libraries. About five hundered thousand of these clay tablets have now been found and they have provided researchers with invaluable knowledge of the Sumerians."

He then goes on to explain that relatively few of them have been translated and that there are probably more to be found, but that based on what we have found and translated, the Sumerian civilization was responsible for a rather amazing (but not unbelievable) number of "firsts".

Anyway, he claims that this Sumerian story (and many others which are similar to Biblical ones) calls their "gods" "Anunnaki," which he claims is better translated as "Those Who Came to Earth from Heaven." He also argues that if we understand the "gods" to be aliens, the stories suddenly seem quite plausible and explain a number of things that current scientific theories can't explain (but of course all of the secret societies are working to keep this under wraps!).

He makes similar arguments using Biblical stories, which he feels are often corrupted from the more ancient accounts of aliens who have manipulated our planet (and of course this author works hard to make it seem that all of this is either guarded or being destoyed by the Freemasons and every other secret society, including Bush's old Yale fraternity...)

I know, I've gone bananas. I must admit, though, entertaining bizarre ideas is kind of fun. John Galt is back, though (yay!), so I'm sure I won't be entertaining them for long!