Ch09: Footnotes
The Event Horizon
The Dispossessed
Idyllic State
Purpose of Law
The Middleman
Noble Capitalist
The Noble Estate
Legal Theft
Ch09: Footnotes
The Event Horizon
The Dispossessed
Idyllic State
Purpose of Law
The Middleman
Noble Capitalist
The Noble Estate
Legal Theft
This is an historic analogy of the physical event horizon of relativity theory. Centred at the seat of the observer's consciousness, it is what he sees as he looks outwards — and hence backwards — through the mists of time towards what he can only speculate to be the ancient events that gave rise to the existence of human life and its subsequent civilization.
At school, I never studied history beyond ordinary level. History seemed to me to be just a bunch of dates giving the when of what aloof kings, generals and politicians did. It was mostly about my own nation's world-view of colonisation and empire in the guise of a benign endeavour to "bring Christianity and civilization to all those poor ignorant savages". To me it had little, if any, connection to the real world that I saw and within which I struggled to survive.
I would have been far more interested to learn how ordinary people fared in their day-to-day lives all the way back down through the ages to the dawn of sentient humanity. When did human consciousness awaken? Gradually over millennia? Was its awakening merely an ignition threshold that occurred along the progressive path of evolution? Or was it a sudden and discrete occurrence? If the latter, what ignited it? What switched it on?
From where did the human mind get its ability to acquire and abstract knowledge about its world? What drove its blind 86-billion neuron brain to form the right interconnections to enable it to correctly quantify and categorise information received via its sensory inputs? How did it gain the ability to reason mindfully in terms of internally phoneticised logical thoughts carried within a grammar-based language? After all, logic [with its symbolic abstraction] is a thing of the mind: it has no natural counterpart other than that it is constrained to obey the natural principle of Selective Inclusion, which is a consequence of nature's ubiquitous Exclusion Principle. Is it possible for such a counter-entropic event just to occur? Or was some nifty piece of analogue software installed somehow? Or is the physical human being built upon an active æthereal framework of some kind, which we cannot see or measure?
When, decades later, I had the time to pursue such knowledge, I quickly found that the events of history are not steered by the will and whims of emperors, kings, politicians or any other kind of human movers and shakers. On the contrary, it was, for the most part, other forces vastly superior to theirs that determined the path of human history.
One such far superior force is the sun. Its power output is not constant. It varies according to multiple superimposed cycles with additional chaotic modulations. The following graph shows how the number of sunspots, present at any given instant, has varied over the past 400 years.
This has had a dominating effect on human history. The Maunder Minimum [1645 to 1715] enforced a mini Dark Age when crops hardly yielded anything and thus had a devastating effect on human history. The Dalton Minimum [1790 to 1830] was less deep but likewise had a dominant effect on human socio-economics. Notwithstanding, the sun is not the only player. Dust in the upper atmosphere resulting from volcanic activity has contributed greatly to ill-faring periods of human history.
There are doubtless other phenomena that, from time to time, could have played albeit lesser parts, although some of these may have precipitated catastrophic effects in the short term.
I see no reason to suppose that solar variation and volcanic activity — together with the longer cycles that precipitate the ice ages — haven't been equally present over millions of years. After all, the sun and the earth, though seen as objects, are interacting complex-dynamical systems, whose behaviours are essentially chaotic.
To be able to know about the events of the past, I need to look backwards in time, while remaining ostensibly at my point of observation in space: namely here on the Earth. Because of the constraints placed upon me by the laws of physics, none of what I wish to observe falls within my physical event horizon.
Ironically, the arrival of the Anunnaki in Sumer [purportedly 10,200 years ago] would be within the physical event horizon of an alien astronomer on a planet orbiting the white dwarf binary FG1 [10,200 light-years away], assuming of course that he had a telescope with sufficient resolution to see the necessary detail.
Yet, all that has taken place in the past, here on Earth, is fundamentally outside my physical event horizon. Consequently, I can't observe it directly the way I can view distant objects of the cosmos. To gain access to my event horizon of history, I must therefore devise indirect means through which to observe it. Happily, such means already exist. These are:
Today, in the early 21st century, there exist future-safe digital copies of practically all ancient texts so far discovered. Texts written in fully meaningful grammar-based languages [such as Sumerian] are thought to have been originated as early as 3,300 BCE. Spoken languages [such as Sanskrit] are thought to go back as far as 5,000 BCE. However, since there were no means of recording sound at that time, what people said or sang back then is lost and fundamentally cannot be retrieved.
Proto-linguistic devices such as art, pictograms & ideograms pre-existed logogram-based forms of writing such as cuneiform, which was used for ancient Sumerian. Notwithstanding, these did not have a sufficient depth of semantic precision for conveying meaningful history.
Artefacts could be buildings such as temples, palaces and pyramids or works of art such as etchings, sculptures and statues. These say at least something about how their creators lived and what they thought and believed. They could also, to some extent, indicate social structure. However, I would wager that the artefacts greatest in both number and value are the stone walls, clay tablets, skins and parchments upon which the ancients recorded their significant events in writing.
So it would seem that by far the most effective means of looking back towards the event horizon of history is by the wholly artificial means of ancient texts.
When looking back along his event horizon into the cosmos, an astronomer needs a way to measure distance. This is to give him a notion of how far away the object is that he is observing and hence, how long ago he is seeing it. For what are short distances, astronomically speaking, he can use what is known as the parallax method, which is reasonably accurate. Notwithstanding, as he ventures further and further out into the cosmos, the parallax method won't work. He therefore has to rely on a precarious ladder of increasingly dubious methods of measuring distance, which are increasingly inaccurate the further out he goes, until measurement becomes meaningless at an impervious fog of microwave background radiation at the outer limit of his event horizon.
Likewise, when looking back along his event horizon of history, an historian needs a way to measure time. This is to give him a notion of how far back in history the artefact that he is examining was made. For what are recent times — events within the Current Epoch [CE] — he can access vast archives of rigorously preserved validated literature, which are reasonably accurate. Notwithstanding, as he ventures further back Before the Current Epoch [BCE], complete validated literature becomes increasingly sparse until it disappears completely. So simply looking up the established dates won't work. He therefore has to rely on a precarious ladder of ever more dubious methods for determining the age of an artefact, which are increasingly inaccurate the further he ventures back in time until measurement becomes meaningless at an impervious fog of indeterminability at the outer limit of his event horizon.
With ancient texts [such as the Bible or the Epic of Gilgamesh] there are two kinds of dates to consider:
In both these cases, it is necessary to acquire an understanding of how the ancient writers expressed dates, such as the year in the reign of a named king, who is one of a known ordered chronology of kings. I think this is how they must arrive at the Biblical date of 4004 BCE as the time of creation and the Garden of Eden.
The other way of determining the date — and hence the age — of an ancient text or artefact is by the method of radiometric dating. I have seen listed up to 17 different types of radiometric dating. However, only two of them are widely used, namely:
Radiocarbon dating This is based on the phenomenon that the radioactive isotope of carbon [14C] has a half-life of 5,730 years, which means that half of the 14C atoms, that were present at the beginning, will have decayed into stable nitrogen [14N] atoms by the end of the following 5,730 years. It can be used to determine the age of dead organic matter over a valid range from 300 years ago to 50,000 years ago. Its accuracy decreases rapidly with age. This method cannot be used to date inorganic materials like rocks.
Potassium-argon dating This is based on the phenomenon that the radioactive isotope of potassium [40K] decays into stable argon [40Ar] and calcium [40Ca] with a half-life of 1·3 billion [1·3 × 109] years. It can be used to determine the age of inorganic material [essentially rocks] ranging from 250,000 to 4·5 billion [4·5 × 109] years ago with a purported accuracy of ±1·5%.
Notwithstanding, only the radiocarbon dating method can be used directly to determine the age of organic material, which is what is needed for researching human history. Some archaeologists, so I have heard, use the potassium-argon method on what are called archaeological sandwiches. These are where an artefact of interest is sandwiched between two successive layers of rock or inorganic sediment, but it says nothing directly about the trapped artefact itself. For instance, it could have been deliberately buried there and covered by inorganic material from somewhere else. I shall therefore concern myself here only with radiocarbon dating, which directly attempts to measure the age of the artefact itself.
Cosmic rays are super fast [very high energy] atomic particles, which arrive from outer space to continually bombard the Earth. Some come from the sun but most come from the Milky Way galaxy and beyond. On reaching the Earth, they collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere.
Since the atmosphere comprises 80% nitrogen, and because cosmic rays comprise 89% protons, the most common collision event is for a high energy proton to smash into the nucleus of a nitrogen atom. This causes the nucleus to eject [among other things] two fast-moving lone neutrons.
A lone neutron has a half-life of only 10 minutes 11 seconds. So whatever it does, it must do quickly. One of its options is to collide with the nucleus of another nitrogen atom, thereby displacing one of its protons. This effectively transmutes the nitrogen atom into a heavy isotope of carbon called carbon-14.
This then steals an oxygen atom from an oxygen O2 molecule in the surrounding atmosphere to become carbon-14 monoxide, leaving the other lone oxygen atom to grab a spare hydrogen atom from its vicinity to form an OH radical. The carbon-14 monoxide then steals the oxygen atom of the OH radical to form carbon-14 dioxide, ejecting the radical's hydrogen atom to find its own way from there.
Thus, in essence, cosmic rays convert nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere, at a rate determined by the cosmic ray flux, into carbon-14 dioxide, which quickly disperses to accumulate along with the normal carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. The ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 + carbon-13 in the atmosphere is currently taken to be 1 in 1012. The constancy of this value is vital to the validity of this method.
Notwithstanding, there are factors that could cause the ratio of 14C to 12C in the atmosphere to vary significantly and chaotically.
The incident cosmic ray flux bombarding the Earth, particularly that of anomalous protons can VARY BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE even for moderate changes in the interstellar medium. Hence significant variations over time in 14C production.
A minor proportion of cosmic rays come from the sun. The cosmic ray flux from the sun increases with increase in sunspot activity. As already seen from the sunspot graph shown earlier, this varies considerably and somewhat chaotically over the years, decades and centuries. Consequently, so does the rate of production of 14C.
Then there is the occasional solar storm, which increases particle flux sufficiently to knock out communication and navigation satellites. How many of these could have occurred over the span of human history?
Since 1500 CE, the Earth's magnetic field has suffered an uneven rate of decline of about 20%. This has opened the door, resulting in a corresponding increased cosmic ray flux hitting the atmosphere. This, in turn, has resulted in a corresponding increase in the rate of 14C production.
In 1945 the first two nuclear bombs were detonated as acts of war. From 1950 until 1963 a large number of nuclear weapons tests were conducted. This caused a spike in the proportion of 14C to 12C in the atmosphere, which peaked at almost double its long-term ambient level, as shown below:
![Radiocarbon Bomb Spike [Public domain content: original by Hokanomono].](images/Radiocarbon_bomb_spike.svg.png "Radiocarbon Bomb Spike
[Public domain content:
original by Hokanomono].")
Consequently, for organic artefacts created after 1950, the 14C dating method is no use and will remain so. The method isn't normally usable anyway for samples less than 300 years old.
"A magnetar called SGR 1806-20 had a burst where in one-tenth of a second it released more energy than the sun has emitted in the last 100,000 years!" — NASA.
Fortunately, this magnetar is 47,290 light years away from Earth. Nevertheless, if its polar pencil beam of radiation swiped the Earth, even from that distance, I wager it would cause a 'bomb spike' of at least similar proportions to the atmospheric nuclear tests of the 1950s.
On 27 December 2005, a huge explosion 50,000 light-years away produced a flash of gamma rays, with an incident power level equivalent to the reflected light of the full moon, which briefly altered the Earth's upper atmosphere. How many events of this kind could have happened over the past 50,000 years? By how much might they have perturbed the 14C to 12C ratio of atmospheric carbon?
Notorious volcanic eruptions such as occurred in 535 AD are probably what ushered in the fall of the Roman Empire and the ensuing Dark Ages of eternal winters, from which the world didn't really start to recover until around 1500. These eruptions no doubt ejected vast quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. Having been fixed in the Earth's crust for thousands if not millions of years, this extra CO2 would be significantly depleted of 14C, thereby severely diluting the 14C content of the atmosphere, which is bound to skew the results of radiocarbon dating.
Asteroids are known to contain nitrogen. At or near their surfaces, this nitrogen is bombarded by cosmic rays from space, thereby turning at least some of that nitrogen into 14C. Asteroids bombard the Earth.
"Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles. About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball, and burns up before reaching the surface." — NASA.
Some asteroids bounce off the atmosphere, some get burned up within it, while larger ones reach the ground. In so doing, they are very likely to deposit what could be old to fairly new 14C into the Earth's atmosphere, thereby augmenting the ambient 14C to 12C ratio.
Throughout the centuries and millennia of history, great forest fires have, from time to time, swept vast areas — perhaps even whole continents. This will, at such times, have greatly diluted the 14CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, thereby reducing the ambient 14C to 12C ratio. From the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the mining and burning of fossil fuels, like coal and oil, will have gradually added to the chaos.
Thus, some of these events sporadically increase the 14C content of the atmosphere while others decrease it, rendering the concentration of 14C in the atmosphere far from constant.
Assuming that the ambient ratio within the Earth's atmosphere of 14C to all carbon 'R' be ostensibly constant at close to 1 in 1012 over the long term, the process by which the age of an artefact is determined is as follows:
| R | = the proportion of 14C to all C in the Earth's atmosphere |
| = 1 atom in 1012 atoms [known, and assumed to be constant] | |
| r | = the proportion of 14C to all C in the artefact [measured] |
| f | = ratio between amount of 14C in artefact to 14C in atmosphere |
| = r ÷ R [calculated] |
From time to time, an atom of radioactive 14C decays spontaneously into an atom of stable 14N [by a process known as soft β-emission: the ejection of an electron each from the two excess neutrons into the atom's own electron cloud] such that, statistically, half the 14C atoms in an artefact sample will decay into 14N atoms every 'h' years, where the variable 'h' is a constant, which is known as the half-life of 14C.
| h | = half-life of 14C [known] |
| = 5,730 years |
| r | = quantity of radioactive material remaining |
| R | = initial quantity of radioactive material |
| n | = number of half-lives that have elapsed |
| f | = r ÷ R [fraction of radioactive material remaining] |
| = (½)n [general formula for decay] | |
| = 1 ÷ 2n |
| Let: | p | = 2n [convenient substitution] |
| so, | p | = 1 ÷ f |
| and | 2n | = p, so |
| n | = log2(p) [number of half-lives] | |
| = ln(p) ÷ ln(2) [using logarithm base rule] | ||
| = ln(1 ÷ f) ÷ ln(2) [substituting for p] |
So, for example, if the concentration of 14C in the artefact sample is only 29·03% of the concentration of 14C in the atmosphere, then the age of the sample 'a' is arrived at as follows:
| n | = ln(1÷0.2903) ÷ ln(2) | |
| = ln(3·444712367) ÷ ln(2) | ||
| = 1·236840408 ÷ 0·693147181 | ||
| = 1·784383522 [age of the sample in 14C half-lives] |
| a | = age of the artefact |
| = h × n [half-life of 14C in years × number of half-lives] | |
| = 5730 × 1·784383522 | |
| = 10224·51758106 years [backwards from 2024-2025 CE] |
Thus, it would seem that the artefact in this example dates from about 8,200 BCE at the time when the Anunnaki purportedly arrived in Sumer.
NOTE: since 'f' is fractional, its natural logarithm will be negative, so 'a' will be given as a positive number of years. The function 'ln' refers to a natural logarithm to base 'e ≅ 2·718281828459045…'. However, normal base-10 logarithms can equally well be used so long as the same type of logarithm is used for both numbers.
The calculation necessary to get an accurate answer is more complicated. For instance, contamination by the absorption of 14C from external sources, effects of 13C and known spikes in the proportion of 14C in the atmosphere must be considered.
Vegetation [flora] absorbs carbon dioxide and water which it photosynthesises into complex hydrocarbons from which it fabricates the material from which it is made. About 1 in 1012 of the molecules of CO2 they absorb is carbon-14 dioxide. Animals [fauna] eat vegetation, and hence hydrocarbons. Some of these hydrocarbons are used to build and maintain their bodies. The rest is used to burn with the air they inhale to produce energy and expel CO2 back into the atmosphere.
NOTE: Throughout its life, a tree fixes carbon continually in its wood, including 14C. Most of the carbon a tree is going to fix has already been fixed by the time the tree reaches maturity, rather than when it dies. Consequently, 14C dates of parchment based on wood pulp could be hundreds of years adrift from when the text was actually written upon it.
Although flora and fauna burn carbon to form CO2, which they exhale, they are also continually fixing some of this carbon within their bodies. Once 14C becomes 'fixed' within a life-form, it starts to undergo unreplenished radioactive decay into 14N. This will have the effect of reducing the 14C to 12C ratio, thereby asserting that the given artefact be older than it really is. The discrepancy increases non-linearly with age.
The gradual process of radioactive decay over time is depicted in the graph below:
I used an iterative method to generate the above graph because such is far closer — both physically and conceptually — to the way the natural process really works than are the mathematical derivative methods, one of which I used to compute the age of a fictitious artefact in the previous section. An iterative method is an actual simulation of the natural process whereas mathematics is simply a language comprising a fit-kit of artificial notions that helps the human mind to get a handle of understanding on the workings of natural processes.
This handle of understanding demands that a so-called solution to the dynamic equation of the process be found. Notwithstanding, such a solution is sought simply because the human thinker prefers to think of the process in terms of a static view of what takes place as a result of the action of the process over a period of time. This is an unnatural view that can only exist within the human memory. Nature has no memory but simply operates in a continuously flowing present. Consequently, the far simpler dynamic representation [simulation] of a process, as given by differential and difference equations, is the real solution.
Consequently, my rather complicated calculations in the previous section involving non-linear mathematical functions [like exponentials and logarithms to various possible bases], could be replaced by merely iterating the simple difference equations f *= k as t += δt from f = 100% until f = fa, the percentage of 14C in the artefact.
As can be seen from the above graph, between f = 50% and f = 25% the gearing between the fraction of 14C remaining and the age of the artefact is fairly close to even [1:1]. However, from f = 12½% downwards, the gearing becomes increasingly disadvantageous to accurate age assessment. Some sources say that 14C can date artefacts up to 40,000 years old. That is almost 7 half-lives. However, looking at the gearing ratio that is apparent from the above graph, I would say that such a claim is 'pushing it' a bit. Notwithstanding, yet other sources even claim that it can be used to date artefacts up to 50,000 years old. That's more than 8·7 half-lives. Considering the gearing ratio that would ensue by imagining the necessary extrapolation of the above graph, I would say that's pushing it too far.
While I applaud the enormous amount of excellent work done by the originators and appliers of 14C dating, it is essential to realise that the method is not the temporal equivalent of a precision steel ruler or a laser rangefinder, but is merely an arbitrary yardstick of capricious elasticity. It is nonetheless useful.
Living memory, in general, doesn't go back more than a century. Mouth-to-mouth legends can traverse many generations and can become embedded into tribal and even national folklore. Unfortunately, human beings have a tendency to embellish and distort what they pass on in this way as it ages and accumulates. It may retain a mycelium of truth running through it, but parsing this out of the ubiquitous 'noise' and 'static' of exaggeration and fantasy is a task that demands much mental dexterity and patience.
Consequently, the only substantial device left to us to peer backward into the event horizon of history is the written word. Notwithstanding, any account that is encoded into symbolic language, can be made to convey whatever its original writer & subsequent editors wish it to say. Inevitably, therefore, any text of any age generally ends up as a mixture of truth and error: a veritable "tree of knowledge of good and evil". And, of course, any ancient text is likely to have absorbed many scripting and translation errors, misinterpretations, plus lies of political expedience and religious distortion edited in by those in power during the epochs through which it passed.
My intuition suggests that this be the case of the world's main ancient texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh [of which I have read little], the Judaeo-Christian Bible [which I know fairly well] and the Qur'an [which I haven't read, although my son has, in an intellectual context, and talks to me about it]. I think it must also be the case for the world's national histories, including those of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks and Romans.
Notwithstanding, my most burning interest is not with marathon trails of daily news concerning what the self-styled movers and shakers of human societies did across the epochs of history. On the contrary, it is the beginning of humanity that interests me. The major ancient texts do contain descriptions of a beginning. Indeed, these descriptions even appear to have what I can best call a nebulous consistency about where we came from; how we got here. Some even purport to tell us where we are going and what we must do.
The oldest known text, the Epic of Gilgamesh, does not contain a description of the creation of the world or the origin of mankind: it commences its epic story with that already having been done long ago:
In those ancient days,
In those distant days,
In those nights,
In those ancient nights,
In those years,
In those distant years,
In those ancient days when all things had been created,
In ancient time when all things were given their place,
When bread was first tasted in the sacred shrines of the land,
When the ovens had been lighted,
When the Heavens had been separated from the Earth,
When the Earth had been separated from the Heavens,
When Mankind had been established:
from The Epic of Gilgamesh written 2,100 BCE [in cuneiform], sung here in the original Sumerian language by Peter Pringle.
The Epic of Gilgamesh relates events that took place during the reign of an ancient hybrid called King Gilgamesh who ruled Sumeria from about 2,700 to 2,500 BCE.
It's interesting to note that this is only 0·82460733 of a 14C half-life back from today [Sun 19 Jan 2025]. The precarious assumptions of 14C dating notwithstanding, tablets and artefacts from the reign of King Gilgamesh should be able to be dated quite accurately.
The date of Noah's Flood obtained by analysing the chronology in the Biblical text is given as 2,350 BCE, although some scholars place it 109 years earlier at 2,459 BCE. So assuming the two time-lines be consistent [an assumption that cannot be totally reliable] the reign of Gilgamesh was either from 350 to 150 or from 241 to 41 years after Noah's Flood.
I call Gilgamesh a hybrid because, within the Epic, he is described as having hybrid parentage and superhuman qualities regarding his size, strength, intelligence and knowledge.
"[Gilgamesh] is the King of Uruk [a splendid, high-walled city in southern Mesopotamia]. His mother was a goddess; his father a mortal. Accordingly, he is a fine specimen of a man, eleven cubits [over 5 metres] tall and four cubits [1·8288 metres: about my height] from nipple to nipple."
Comment: The '5 metres tall' thing bothers me. The tallest man on record was Robert Wadlow. He was just under 2·72 metres tall. I don't think the human skeleton could support being any bigger because the nature and character of bone is not scalable. Giant dinosaurs had honeycombed bones that had a much higher strength to weight ratio like those of birds. So, if Gilgamesh were indeed 5 metres tall, his physiology must have been non-human. Perhaps he was a hybrid humanoid avian. I often wondered why some of those ancient wall carvings depict humanoid gods with bird heads.
Gilgamesh had an enemy called Enkidu, who became a friend. He was also a hybrid, except that his parents were the reverse: his father was a god and his mother was a human. He had been born in the wild where he roamed with the animals [a bit like King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible]:
Enkidu sat before the woman.
The two of them made love together,
And he forgot the wild where he was born.
For seven days and seven nights, Enkidu remained erect,
and made love to Shamhat.
The woman opened her mouth and spoke to Enkidu, saying:
"I look at you Enkidu and you are like a god.
Why do you roam through the wilds with the animals?
Come, I will lead you through the grand avenue of Uruk.
Enkidu, arise! I will take you to E-Anna, the sacred home of Anu".
He heard her words and consented.
The counsel of the woman struck home in his heart.
She took off her clothes, divided them, and dressed him in one part.
The other part she put on herself.
So went Enkidu, with Shamhat following behind.
He entered the great avenue of Uruk.
Crowds gathered, saying:
"In build he is the equal of Gilgamesh,
shorter of height but sturdier of bone."
from The Epic of Gilgamesh written in 2,100 BCE [in cuneiform], sung here in the Ancient Babylonian language by Peter Pringle.
The Epic clearly tells us that these two guys were man/goddess and god/woman hybrids. And they were, even by today's well-fed standards, giants who were clearly endowed with super-powers [seven days and seven nights: I should think so!].
The existence of giants is alluded to in many places in ancient texts. For example: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." — Numbers 13.33 [Judaeo-Christian Bible]
The Book of Enoch puts these blighters at 3000 els tall. Assuming consistensy with the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh an "el" must be 11×18 ÷ 3000 = 0·066 (or just over a sixteenth) of an inch [1.675 mm] (what?).
The Epic of Gilgamesh doesn't tell us what size the gods and goddesses were. If indeed they too were giants alongside humans, I should imagine the process of hybrid procreation to be fraught with mechanical difficulties. I'm sure Shamhat would have found it much easier with a horse. But perhaps she also was a 5-metre tall hybrid.
Notwithstanding, my last quip does draw attention to the notion that gods and humans must, as species, have been reproductively compatible. In other words, they were "made in the same image — male & female". By contrast, within the Judaeo-Christian Bible — at least as presented in English — the implication is that all gods, angels and demons are strictly male-only.
Perhaps these hybrids [or demigods] like Gilgamesh & Enkidu are what the Judaeo-Christian Bible refers to as Nephilim.
"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men [Nephilim] which were of old, men of renown." — Genesis 6.4 [Judaeo-Christian Bible]
The Bible implies that male gods had a lustful attraction for human women, and, for this, engaged in physical sexual intercourse with them and bore hybrid offspring called Nephilim. Thus the gods must have had full sexual functionality, which was compatible with human physiology. After a significantly parallel account in the Epic of Gilgamesh are the examples of Enkidu [who was fathered by a god and born of a human mother] and Gilgamesh himself whose parents were a male human [a man] and a female god [a goddess]. So perhaps these unions gave rise to both male and female hybrids, although, by all accounts, they didn't seem to be very nice people.
But couldn't these gods, goddesses and hybrids have been nothing more than the ancient Sumerian versions of our own superheroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Spider-Man and Ladybug?
Yes, they could be characters of fiction or fantasy, but the general spirit of the texts does not convey that sentiment to me. The texts exude to me the feeling that the writer believes what he is writing to be factual. It may be distorted or embellished, but it seems to be at least founded upon something real. Besides, I cannot imagine ancient scribes being enamoured by the thought of embarking on what must have been a long and arduous labour of pushing a cuneiform stylus into clay tablets, just to write pulp fiction or fantasy. I get the feeling that there must be some vestige of truth lingering within those ancient semantic mists.
On the other hand, these mighty beings could be personifications of the collective strength, knowledge and intellect of a tribe or nation. Large complex systems and abstract entities are often personified in order to give body and focus to them so we can describe and explain them more easily and clearly. For instance, we personify the Earth's biosphere as a female deity called Gaia; while fairies and elves personify the workings of 'her' various constituents. But I don't think this is the case here.
Inset: Perhaps the Christian Trinity is an instance of such personification. That reality includes a universal intelligence has always been unignorably obvious to me. Notwithstanding, I've never been able to conceive of it as a person nor engage with it through any kind of personal relationship. So, to me, the Creator God is a personification of the Physical Universe; the Word, a personification of an all-pervading intelligence that facilitates life; the Spirit of Man, a personification of a universal field of consciousness, which facilitates individualised sentience and mindful thought.
Thus it would seem, according to the Epic, that the reign of Gilgamesh was entirely post-diluvian. Hence, Gilgamesh and Enkidu were hybrids that were around after the Flood had finished. So either the Flood didn't obliterate all life on Earth except for Ziusudra [the Biblical Noah] and his family; or, these 5-metre tall hybrids, together with the gods and goddesses who were instrumental in procreating them, were somehow able to out-swim or otherwise survive destruction by the Flood.
So now is perhaps the time to penetrate much further back into those ante-diluvian mists towards the birth of human civilisation, which, according to the ancient texts, was engineered by these gods, goddesses and hybrids. The following is a very fuzzy overview of the story, as it comes across to me.
As I am given to understand, the word 'Anunnaki' means 'ancestors'. However, hard physical evidence of the lives and exploits of these Anunnaki seems sparse. Most of what is known is from ancient texts etched into clay tablets in the cuneiform-based language of the ancient Sumerians, often with glyphic icons. I take my hat off to the historians that deciphered all that stuff.
The story of the Anunnaki begins with some very wise and knowledgeable people arriving in Mesopotamia by sea at around 8,200 BCE. A wide range of other dates is banded about, but 8,200 BCE is when the Earth had just rounded the top of the temperature cliff after its steep 1000-year ascent out of the last ice age into the beginning of the warm Holocene epoch [in which we still live]. The world population was only around 5 million. Just the right time for a new beginning.
It's interesting to note that this is still only 1·784467714 half-lives of 14C back from today [Wed 22 Jan 2025]. Therefore [the precarious assumptions of 14C dating notwithstanding], tablets and artefacts from the arrival of the Anunnaki should also be able to be dated quite accurately. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem much of anything to date.
Please don't be fazed by the obvious absurdity of the Anunnaki arriving 4196 years before the Biblical creation of all things. Time lines from both text-based chronologies and radiometry are subject to somewhat elastic interpretations. An autistic level of mechanical exactitude isn't important. What's important is the sequence, form and manner in which human civilisation began then unfolded across the subsequent millennia.
Researchers speculate from the texts that the Anunnaki had fled a recent natural catastrophe in their original homeland somewhere else on the planet. Notwithstanding, I don't recall any evidence of such a catastrophe being mentioned in the texts. It seems to be merely a convenient reason, proffered by historians, for their sudden appearance in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India.
This implies that, at this time, a human society with advanced knowledge of language, mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, agriculture, art, architecture, strong moral values, law and justice had already existed somewhere for quite some time. Some speculate that they could have escaped from an island continent, which had become submerged by the rising sea level resulting from the melting ice.
But were they human? If so, why were they described as gods that were 'shining' or 'luminous'? Are these adjectives used literally? Or were they metaphors depicting their 'shining' knowledge or their 'illuminated' minds? The form of description feels to me more like that of a reporter or technical writer than that of a poet or fantasist. Furthermore, although it's possible to write unambiguously by making sure you adequately qualify what you say, it seems that many writers rarely bother, including those who wrote the ancient texts. Each one seems to write within his own assumed context, of which the historian of the distant future wouldn't be aware.
There remains, of course, the enigma of Enkidu. The illustrations I have seen of him show him as a giant hairy man with bull's horns and legs. His horns are placed too low and back on his head to be physiologically credible. Bulls have their horns at the top front of their skulls for sound structural reason. As a bi-pedal creature, bull's legs would not provide Enkidu with the intricate muscle control afforded by human feet to maintain the precise balance needed for bi-pedal locomotion.
However, like our languages today, the ancient languages also most likely had many words that were context-dependent. Literally, Moses [of the Bible] is described as having horns when he descended from the mountain after having been in the presence of God. But this is translated [correctly, I think] as his face shining. The horns, in this context, are rays of luminosity. Enkidu's 'horns' were also most likely context-dependent. Perhaps they refer to the way his turbo-charged man-part performed during his 7 days and 7 nights of hanky-panky with Shamhat. English has a whole plethora of context-dependent names for this. But really, I expect that, in the case of Enkidu too, it referred to his shining countenance.
As evinced by the procreation of hybrids like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the Epic tells us that both gods and goddesses had full sexual feelings and functionality like humans. Thus god/woman and man/goddess reproduction is possible. This raises the obvious question as to whether or not gods and goddesses could have "gone in" to each other and procreated little gods? Indeed, the Epic of Gilgamesh does say that the Annunaki are deities descended from An [the god of heaven] and Ki [the goddess of earth]. This asserts that the Anunnaki weren't human. However, it raises the question of where are all the subsequent generations descended from An and Ki?
So I think it must be left as an open question as to whether the Anunnaki were:
Consequently, the story, as it stands, says nothing about how the Anunnaki themselves came to be, nor how they gained their superior intelligence, which set them apart from all other life-forms on the planet, equipped them to observe and analyse what they saw, experienced and suffered, enabling them to gain an understanding of their world and exchange their thoughts with others of their kind through their advanced grammar-based language.
Their indigenous hosts didn't have agriculture. So the Anunnaki established an agricultural project, which is thought by some to be what is portrayed, in Genesis, by the Garden of Eden. The Anunnaki organised themselves in functional groups: farmers, teachers, soldiers. They guarded the agricultural project, within which they raised crops and taught some of their indigenous hosts what they may and may not eat from the Garden. The Anunnaki also classified their knowledge into what may and what may not be taught or revealed to their indigenous hosts.
All went well until some of the indigenous students — who are portrayed in Genesis by Adam and Eve — decided to eat what was not allowed and to find out things that it was forbidden for them to know. Perhaps this was knowledge that the indigenous hosts were not yet ready and able to use responsibly. The infractors were therefore expelled by force from the Garden and sent out to try to survive in the world, at a time when its climate was becoming increasingly extreme, without the advantage of agricultural knowledge and experience.
There seems to be an idea within the texts that this expulsion was precipitated by some of the Anunnaki themselves. Part of them rebelled against their established order and bated their naive indigenous hosts to eat what was forbidden and learn things for which they were not ready. So these Anunnaki rebels were also expelled into the wilderness to rape and pillage the rest of the world. Which they did. This seems to be very similar to the story of Adam & Eve in Genesis.
At this point, the Anunnaki good guys and their "Garden of Eden" agricultural project seem to suddenly disappear off the face of the Earth. They're never seen again except for a few lone appearances to individual prophets:
![My own depiction of an encounter between an ancient prophet and an 'El' or Shining One [by Robert John Morton].](../chap03/images/vision.jpg "My [tongue-in-cheek] depiction of
an encounter between an ancient
prophet and a 'Shining One'.")
But the bad guys remained. These Anunnaki remainers [gods] then started to ogle indigenous human women, marry them and have children by them. Judging by the parentage of Gilgamesh, some of the female Anunnaki remainers [goddesses] likewise ogled the indigenous men, married them and had children by them. But this wasn't merely a bit of 'interracial': their offspring were giants, five metres tall with superhuman strength and intelligence like Gilgamesh & Enkidu. So different were they that they were considered to be a separate hybrid species, which the Judaeo-Christian Bible refers to as Nephilim.
These Anunnaki rebels taught their wives [or husbands] and children the forbidden knowledge concerning the fabrication of weapons and techniques of war. They also taught them to kill, cook and eat animals. This implies that before this, indigenous humans were vegetarian. But it didn't stop here. They also began to eat each other.
A mysterious figure called Enoch, who was a 'sanctified' observer, reporter and documenter, passed this sorry information back to the mainstream Anunnaki, who, subsequently found it necessary to destroy all life on the planet with a grand flood: that is, except for a righteous remnant, who were preserved as recounted in the parallel story of Noah's arc in the Bible. That was the end of indigenous humanity, except, of course, for Ziusudra [the person the Bible refers to as Noah], his wife, his 3 sons and their wives. As evinced by Gilgamesh's post-diluvian encounter with Ziusudra, at least some of the hybrids also seem to have independently survived the Flood.
After the Flood, the Anunnaki rebels were somehow put under permanent restraint so that they could not take physical action in the post-diluvian age. So we are fundamentally unable to ever encounter any post-diluvian Anunnaki.
Thus we have 3 kinds of beings here:
Anunnaki — portrayed as gods and goddesses, some of whom rebelled against their established order and thereby became the bad gods.
Hybrids — the progeny of unions between bad Anunnaki and humans. Highly intelligent giants. Nothing is specifically said about gender but I don't have reason to think that there weren't both male and female hybrids.
Humans — the original uncivilised indigenous inhabitants of the land. And there is no doubt that humans come in both male and female versions.
Of course, the Anunnaki could simply have been an advanced civilization of humans who were desperately seeking a new home and hoped to be accepted by the indigenous population by offering to civilise them and teach them agriculture. But knowing something of human nature and the hegemonic behaviour of colonising nations throughout history, I cannot see this as being plausible.
The Anunnaki were said to be shining or luminous and perhaps also of giant stature like their future hybrid offspring. So, with their superior stature, advanced knowledge [and hence, their implied technology], why wouldn't the Anunnaki just forcibly invade and conquer their indigenous hosts? Perhaps it was because the Anunnaki had some kind of specific and particular mission to accomplish regarding the development of humanity.
But where did the Anunnaki come from? Where did they go?
The ancient Sumerian creation myths — at least what is left of them — seem to me to be very bitty. I like the discussions about these myths in the podcast: The Earliest Creation Myths. I summarise below what I've gleaned from this and other sources. However, they all seem to focus on the 'creation' of civilization rather than on the creation of all things. The first 4 below are Sumerian creation myths.
The Barton cylinder has many gaps in its story, probably due to damage. To me, its introduction is pretty well the same as that of the Epic of Gilgamesh, emphasising that it is talking about a time that is in the very distant past. A tremendous storm [Heaven and Earth shouting together] with gales and lightening occurred near the sanctuary of Nippur [an ancient Sumerian city]. There are gaps but it seems to be saying that somebody had intercourse with the great Queen of Heaven who had 7 children.... Water was created and the rivers flowed. Not much of a creation myth.
The debate Between Sheep and Grain implies that An, the god of Heaven, created the Anunnaki. So it would appear that the Anunnaki weren't procreated by the God of Heaven and Goddess of Earth. And concerning creation, that's it. Grain, sheep [or goats], hadn't yet been created. The Anunnaki [the great gods] didn't even know what they were. People in those days didn't know about bread or wearing clothes. They went about naked, eating grass and drinking water from ditches. Then it describes that grain and sheep brought wealth to the land and goes on about how marvellous and beneficial that is. But who taught them agriculture? It doesn't seem to say. Again, not much of a creation myth.
The Debate between Winter and Summer relates how the gods An and Enlil caused people to spread throughout the land by providing days and nights and summers and winters with the right amount of sunshine and irrigation. It strikes me as how the climate would pan out as the land passed through the opening centuries of the Holocene epoch once the ice age had finished. It's not really to do with creation.
The beginning of the Eridu Genesis, which may well have described the origin of the Earth and mankind, is lost. So, sadly, no account of creation. What we have begins with mankind living as nomads. Nintur, the Mother Goddess, desires that her human offspring become civilised. But they don't respond. Eventually they learn agriculture and build cities as distribution centres [not markets] and a kingship [bureaucracy] so that all may benefit from the produce. [other missing sections] But it seems that from an organised tranquil start, humans began to make noises [become corrupt, unruly?] so the god Enlil decided to destroy humanity with a Flood. But beforehand, the god Enki tells Ziusudra [the Biblical Noah?] to build a boat to preserve his family and animals from the Flood. And they are the only humans to survive.
The only well preserved and complete creation account that I have come across is the Genesis account in the Judaeo-Christian Bible, although from the little I have seen of the Qur'an story of creation, it looks similar, if not identical. I don't know about the Egyptian and Hindu notions of creation, although the Egyptian civilisation does feature the pyramid: the symbol of oppressive hierarchical control.
There exist other creation myths. For instance, those of various aboriginal peoples. However, their creation myths have a pertinent difference. With them, at least for the most part, there seems to be no schism between divine factions. No rebellion. Nothing equivalent to the so-called 'fall of man'. Hence their societies — at least some of them — never adopted the hierarchical structure for social control through subjugation and oppression, in the absence of which they developed naturally as benign egalitarian networks, guided by the wisdom of their old ones.
Notwithstanding, nothing so far has given any inkling about how we got here, where and how the Anunnaki came to be and where the cosmos came from. For answers to our own origin, we seem to have 4 popular propositions:
Humans were created from clay [creatus ex argilla], which, in turn, was created out of nothing [creatio ex nihilo] by non-physical beings [God or gods] who have existed eternally and inhabit dimensions that are beyond human sense and perception, or
Humans evolved from an ancient single-celled life-form, LUCA [last universal common ancestor], from simple to complex, under the resident forces of its environment, governed solely by the Laws of Physics.
Humans were genetically engineered, by ancient astronauts, from ancient non-sentient hominids that had already evolved, being thereby imbued with the power of mental abstraction, logical thought and language.
Humans are simply here but we don't really know how we came to be. This we just accept, while maintaining an ambivalent attitude to whatever ideas are presented by those who like to research and speculate.
Propositions (1) and (2) contain many insurmountable inconsistencies and discrepancies with both common sense and with the Laws of Physics. Proposition (3) is intriguing. Notwithstanding, I have difficulty with the idea of ancient astronauts since any evidence of them seems still to be 100% lacking, despite concerted effort over many decades in the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Yet, one must remain open-minded. Perhaps what are thought to be extraterrestrials could be beings from here on Earth who are, by nature, beyond human sense and perception, except at times when they wish to be seen by us.
I tend, myself, to favour Proposition (4). This doesn't mean that I reject science or scientific ideas, theories and conjectures. On the contrary, I embrace them all. But though I may extrapolate into what is currently unproven, I am careful to distinguish between what is known and what is speculation. I don't try to shoehorn speculation, however appealing it may appear, into the body of what is currently certain.
To me, knowledge is a colour coded contoured map of reality with areas of varying certainty. But within the map there are black areas representing what is still unproven conjecture. Full of plausible theories, but still unproven. My quest and comfort is in getting to know, ever more precisely, where the boundaries of these black areas lie. But the Big Questions still remain.
How did life come to be? What, from simple proteins [relatively small molecular structures], suddenly constructed and activated LUCA: a fully functional biological machine, 42 million times the size and complexity of the proteins from which it is built? This would have to be a counter-entropic process, which, unless it was expedited by an external agency, would constitute a flagrant violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
What would motivate LUCA to evolve into the diversity of life-forms that constitute our biosphere? In other words, why should life want to evolve or even preserve itself? What is telling it to do that? There is nothing in the Laws of Physics to demand that a life-form preserve or better itself. That too would be a counter-entropic process, which again could only be driven by an external active intelligence directly, or under the program-control of 'software' 'written' by an external intelligence. This conundrum is probably what motivated the ancient Greek philosophers to come up with the idea of the 'Logos'.
How did the human being come to be so different from all other animals on the planet? There doesn't seem to be much that it can eat that doesn't require preparation or cooking. So much so that it hardly seems native to the planet. How did it acquire its vastly superior intelligence, with a brain that's physically smaller than that of many lesser animals? And how did the human mind acquire the ability for conscious thought — which it expresses in terms of a grammar-based language incorporating the mechanisms of logic and mathematics — about society, law and justice?
If mankind were either created ex nihilo or genetically engineered by gods or aliens, then as their intelligent created off-spring, why don't they talk to us? Why don't they tell us what they did and why they did it: not in ambiguous, incomprehensible, nebulous, ethereal visions and metaphors, but the way a technical writer would explain it? If they created our intelligence and imbued our minds with the power of abstract logical thought, they would have the capability of communicating perfectly with what they had created. Perhaps they did, but the documentation got lost or destroyed and substituted by the crap we have been made to adhere to down through the ages. But where are they? Why did they go? All of us need to know: not just wild-eyed fundamentalists.
The human brain is an 86-billion neuron network, forming a device that models our physio-social environment by adjusting and honing the weightings between its connections. It empowers us to navigate and survive within the physio-social environment. It is what may be described as a vast analogue computer, whose operation is governed exclusively by the Laws of Physics.
But the human also has the power of abstract thought. And this is something else. It involves the abstracting, naming, categorising and interrelating of tangible objects within its environment. These processes are governed by what are known as the Laws of Thought. Like the Laws of Physics, the Laws of Thought are immutable. But they are nowhere found within the physical world. The Laws of Thought are not part of the Laws of Physics. They have a separate existence.
Consequently, they cannot have been brought to be through any process that could take place within the 86-billion neuron analogue super computer that is the human brain. Logical processes involving mental abstraction, categorisation, interrelation, deduction and language can only take place within the conscious mind. They can only be done mindfully: not subconsciously as if on 'autopilot'. The Laws of Thought are what we may loosely term 'digital' as opposed to the Laws of Physics, which involve continuous variability, which is essentially what we think of as 'analogue'.
So, where did these Laws of Thought come from? How did they become 'embedded' in the human mind and not in the minds of any other animals? It is a valid and open question. It's these that have enabled humans to form hierarchies of social oppression and functional teams, which animals can't do. And it's the Laws of Thought that empowered humanity to acquire and accumulate knowledge. So how did it happen?
I have read from various sources that something big happened about 60,000 years ago. Unfortunately, that's over 10 14C half-lives ago, with ground-scouring ice ages having taken place in between. So getting the precise dates of anything from that period is problematic. Besides, the population at that time is thought to have been between 1 and 2 million spread over the habitable land of the entire planet. I can't see this as being enough to muster the critical mass anywhere capable of igniting a great intellectual leap forward without the intervention of an external agency.
Without some kind of external intelligent agency, there's nothing within the physical world that could motivate or sustain such a counter-entropic process.
The Laws of Physics, which govern the entire universe, include the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This may be summarised as saying that all physical processes — one way or another — turn order into chaos. Some processes may result in some form of localised order being created. But this can only happen at the expense of a greater amount of chaos in general. The only thing that can reverse this process is intelligence. And it is seen to exist in the universe. Hence, as I have mentioned, the Greek philosophers formulated the idea of the Logos, or universal intelligence.
Such interventions of intelligence have been seen to occur in biological life. Life turns raw molecules [proteins] into life-forms. At least it orchestrates the reproduction of already-existing template life-forms. But the supposed counter-entropic process that constructed the first template [cell] is an enigma. And, whatever did this, also installed within the universal life-form the motive for self-preservation, which has no part with the Laws of Physics.
The second counter-entropic process I have mentioned is the installation, within the human mind, of the logical Laws of Thought, which give rise to the human ability to learn language and use it to process and exchange thoughts. This too, cannot be constructed from, nor has any part with, the Laws of Physics.
But there is a third distinct counter-entropic process that took place at the dawn of civilisation. That is, the inherent lust to order and control others, which seems to be firmly embedded within the human proto-psych. It is something that animals don't have. It is something that the indigenous human being does not seem to have. And it seems by all accounts to have been installed within the human psych by the Anunnaki in order to facilitate their rancid system of hierarchical subjugation and oppression. Or, at least, if it were already dormant within the human psych, it was at that time awakened by the Anunnaki.
Our event horizon of history, like the event horizon of space-time, affords us a view of only limited clarity. It diminishes rapidly into the mists, which become evermore impervious as we strive to look ever further back in time. But that doesn't matter.
It really doesn't matter whether or not the purported actors in these historic tales — gods, hybrids, humans — were real. Notwithstanding, it would be the height of arrogance for us to categorically deny the possibility of their existence, just because we have never seen them or found any substantial archaeological evidence of them. Ordinary humans may have been so terrified of hybrids that they set about to exterminate them and erase any trace of them by burning them to ash. Absence of evidence doesn't prove non-existence.
However, although all the records of history are fragmented, incomplete and inconclusive; it's OK. We don't need them to be otherwise. Everything we need is there.
This is because the historical record comprises many different stories about what is essentially the same play, repeated hundreds if not thousands of times. It's only the individual actors that change. Consequently there's a vast abundance of fragments, to give us clear sight of what we're looking at, from which we're able to confidently construct the systemic essence of what has been happening throughout. Besides, it is all embedded within the collective Zeitgeist of those ancient civilisations, which has been inherited by and within those of each nation of the modern world.
And the embedded message would seem to be as follows:
At the dawn of the Holocene, just as the Earth had finished heaving itself out of the last Ice Age, the indigenous nomads of Mesopotamia, found an influx of mysterious wise and knowledgeable beings arriving among them. These were the Anunnaki. They were sentient beings of enormous stature and shining countenance. They established a project to teach the nomads agriculture. They also taught the nomads what they must and must not do in order to live in peace and harmony.
But then a schism occurred among the Anunnaki themselves. About half of them rebelled against their established order. The rebels beguiled the formerly nomadic humans to eat what was not right for them and pursue knowledge that was harmful. So the good Anunnaki ejected both the humans and their own rebels from the place where they were, shut down the project and disappeared off the face of the planet.
The Anunnaki rebels stayed and, probably because of their large stature, shining countenances and overwhelming knowledge, were seen by the indigenous humans as gods. These Anunnaki ruled over their human prey as god-kings of small city-states within the Tigris-Euphrates area of Mesopotamia, which was generally known as Sumeria. By all accounts, they were belligerent psychopathic bullies, forcibly subjugating their human underlings to hard labour through oppressive bureaucratic hierarchies of command and control. They intermarried with their human subjects, thereby procreating a hybrid race of god/human beings, which the Judaeo-Christian Bible refers to as Nephilim. These, like their divine progenitors, were also of enormous stature and shining countenance. Thus subjugation and oppression flourished with an ever-tightening grip over a hapless humanity, in which man oppressed man, with a god-king at the very top of the hierarchical pyramid, presiding over slavery, war and even human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Thus was established, and etched within the Zeitgeist of the people, the modus operandi whereby human civilisation would function under its exclusive universal law of 'might is right'. And the people saw it as good and correct. That's how it works. That's how it should be.
Notwithstanding, that wasn't the way the original Anunnaki good-guys saw it. They were no longer present, but they had been kept informed of the situation. And they didn't see it as good or correct. They saw it as foul, corrupt, unacceptable, unworkable. They forthrightly disagreed that the socio-economic endeavours of mankind should be conducted this way. They became so appalled after 5,800 years of this shit that they saw the only way out to be to destroy all but a small righteous remnant of humanity. This they did by means of a universal flood. To avoid any possible re-occurrence, they permanently removed the Anunnaki bad guys from the scene.
Unfortunately, in addition to the righteous remnant of humans, some of the hybrids also survived the flood, Gilgamesh being one. And within him and his kind, the essence of the whole rancid pre-diluvian system survived and was consequently re-installed into the post-diluvian Zeitgeists of the civilised nations.
We see no hybrids today. There are stories concerning giants in various parts of the globe. But they have now all been annihilated, so far as is known. Yet the system remains. And Gilgamesh lives, still at the top of his oppressive pyramid of command and control. He is still the psychopath that ever he was. He is the businessman's Imaginary Friend. He is the limited liability corporation. Though we may be deluded through sham democracy that 'we the people' have collective self-determination over our destiny, the lives of all of us are ordered according to the corporate model. We do not and cannot elect our bosses or otherwise influence corporate policy.
Thus, what we see is that each historical event, epoch or phase is the application by an exigent god or king of the same rancid regime of hierarchical subjugation and oppression to a society of hapless, powerless submissives, with which it is systemically incompatible.
This is because a regime of hierarchical control can only be meaningfully applied to a device such as a machine, which comprises an integrated set of fixed functionally different-but-complementary components. But a human community isn't, by nature, a device or machine. It is a complex-dynamical system of interacting yet independent individuals, which has more the form of a cloud in the sky. So however finely it may be divided, each part of it will be essentially the same as the whole.
So in order to enslave society under his hierarchy of oppression, the king formulates his law, whose purpose is to facilitate the containment and exploitation of the meek by the exigent. To this end, he then hires judges and police — thugs who prostitute their mental and bodily strengths, in return for the king's shilling, to enforce his law.
But it never lasts. The people suffer. The people rebel. The people break free. That is, until they are forcibly corralled once again under yet another hierarchical order. And so the wheel of history turns. But this dysfunctional merry-go-round cannot last forever. Bland systemic analysis prophesies incontrovertibly that one day, when our common wisdom exceeds the threshold of global insurrection, then shall the meek inherit the Earth.
Until then, as we can well see, the vicious cycle of oppression and exploitation continues. This is because the sycophantic people fawn and swoon before exigence and power, electing bullies and criminals to rule over them.