Twelfth Planet: Book I of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles) by Zecharia Sitchin Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Twelfth Planet: Book I of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles)
Book Review: The essencial report about our hidden past
Summary: 5 Stars
Truly hard work, large and multidisciplinar knowledge - and some rare skills - are the roots of Mr. Sitchin quest on our almost lost primi-historical dangerous ground. For the sake of truth and fully understanding our real origins, his "Earth Chronicles" - wich "The 12th Planet" inaugurates - are of the most valuable help. I hope the young generations can find, at last, some more clear and fair answers about "Who are we" and "Who created us, besides the usual enygmas. The astonishing tale of the extraterrestrial intervention, now supported by many archeological findings all over the world, emerges as a very functional hipothesis for the new historical science, with the due revision and more acurate translation and re-interpretation of the ancient texts and religious documents overhaul by Mr. Sitchin with clean and clever eyes. The cogent statements, connections and findings on the most of Zecharia Sitchin's work deserve our best reading and open minded audience. An entirely new "big picture" can be drawn, step by step, from the dawn of our History. One can find, of course, some questionnable views on such a difficult and interdisciplinar field of investigation - the stake is high. But, in the very end, I think the volume and nature of Mr. Sithin's work really deserves, to say it all, the Nobel prize.Book Review: So what happened to Nibiru in historic times?
Summary: 4 Stars
Sitchin's books are always a pleasure to read with the author's engaging style and bold assertions, but the most obvious hole in his theory is that there is NO evidence of any cataclysm or upheaval in 100BC when Nibiru was supposed to have passed the earth according to the author's own chronology. He claims it comes by every 3600 years and that it caused the great upheavals and the end of the last ice age in about 10 000 BC. Also, he makes unscientific statements about linguistic affinity and does not work like a scientist here. It is easy enough to find similarities between a language in Eurasia and one in the Americas, but one must put this in context, in a broader taxonomy (classification structure). There are similarities between Sumerian and Nostratic (Eurasiatic) the parent family of Indo-European and many others, and also (other)similarities between Sumerian and Dene-Caucasic. For these, I recommend the work of professional linguists like Alan Bomhard, Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen. Sitchin takes many liberties but at least he does it in an entertaining way.Book Review: A provocative new theory of man's history
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the first book in Sitchin's monumental Earth Chronicles series. It is important to remember that fact because there is necessarily a lot of introductory material to be presented here in order to lay the foundation for what is to come. In other words, most of the really interesting stuff comes later in the series--Ancient Egypt, MesoAmerica, etc. Parts of this first book are somewhat dry and hard to get through. As one gets into the latter half, though, some pretty amazing arguments are made. If you read this book and no other, you may well have a hard time even sanctioning the kinds of ideas Sitchen presents, let alone believing them. When you read the rest of the series, though, the arguments are threshed out much more thoroughly and should at least lend an idea of possiblity to objective readers. The idea that "ancient astronauts" (a term I dislike) had a hand in Man's creation and evolution is not new. Sitchin goes far beyond the normal arguments, however. He argues that there is an undiscovered planet in our own solar system upon which life developed and evolved millions of years before life on earth, a planet that seeded earth with its earliest life forms millions of years ago when this undiscovered planet entered our solar system and essentially crashed into a large planet between Mars and Jupiter--the planet in question was broken up into two parts, one eventually forming Earth and the other the asteroid belt. The 12th planet (counting the sun and moon as planets) he calls Nibiru; it is a planet with an eccentric orbit carrying it well past the other nine planets thousands of years at a time. Here life developed and advanced at a very early period. Needing resources, particularly gold, the planet sent forth emissaries to earth. In order to free themselves of the hard labor of mining, these aliens, the Nefilim, created Man by combining their genes with those of the ape men then on earth, a procedure made possible by the fact that the two races were in fact genetic cousins. Thus, the Nefilim became early man's gods, and their stories were told in the artifacts of the ancient Sumerians and of the kingdoms that came after them.
Sitchin makes a determined effort to tie Christianity and the Bible to the tale he unfolds. He effectively, and with good evidence, shows that the early stories in the Bible are based largely on older manuscripts from Sumeria. He explains many of the mysterious passages in the Bible by tying the stories to more complete Sumerian tales--the Elohim, the plural Deity mentioned in the Creation story, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, and others. In this endeavor, he is very successful. While one may not be convinced of his story of life on Earth, one cannot doubt the fact that the early books of the Bible are basically a condensed version of former manuscripts. He makes a convincing argument for his theories, but one will not be and should not be convinced based on this one book. Much supporting evidence is to be found in the later books in the series, where a far richer version of man's history is presented by the author. As unbelievable as many of his ideas sound, Sitchin actually does an effective job of answering many of the big questions that scientists and theologians have been unable to answer about life on earth, the most important of which is an explanation of why home sapiens developed so suddenly and miraculously 300,000 years ago. Right or wrong, his ideas answer a lot of questions and deserve serious study. Sitchin's knowledge of ancient civilizations is immense, and his judgments cannot be dismissed without serious attention paid to them.
Book Review: Fantasy shrouded in pseudo-science
Summary: 1 Stars
With this book Sitchin has far outdone himself through fantasy, rhetoric and imagination. His claim is that there is a twelth body in our solar system (counting moon and sun), whose orbit brings it into the solar system every few thousand years. He claims that intelligent beings from this planet implanted earth with life, which is revealed in ancient texts. To put it bluntly, anyone who has been taken by this has been dupped. I mean no disrespect, but Sitchin's claims are not only physically impossible, but his scholarship is damnable. While some claim that he "is one of the first to read cuneiform," this is out and out false. The early decipherers of cuneiform were G. Grotefend, H. Rawlinson, E. Hincks, W. Talbot and J. Oppert and they were able to decipher the script based on the text copied by Rawlinson at Behistun. The decipherment was deemed complete in 1857 when independent translations of an unpublished text from the time of Tiglath-Pileser were compared. Sumerian, which Sitchin claims to know (even being called a Sumerologist), is still a more troublesome matter. While written in the cuneiform script, the earliest texts (ca. 3000 BCE) are written mostly in logograms with very little grammatical information indicated so their interpretation is more difficult. Later copies (ca. 2000-1000), are written with more syllabic signs, thus indicating more of the grammar. In any case, Sitchin has never received any formal training in Sumerology or Assyriology - he is an autodidact. His translations and use of archaeology are faulty and confused. Any bit of probing of the relavent scholarly literature will provide light on the actual meaning and content of these texts. There is no conspiracy in the scholarly community to withhold this information - it is simply erroneous. Believe me, scholars would love it if it were true. It would put their names in the paper and they would actually sell books. Actual archaeology and textual translation are somewhat more mundane, but still fascinating. Don't be fooled! Sitchin couches his follies in academic jargon, but his books should be read as fiction!Book Review: It explains such a lot!
Summary: 4 Stars
I've just finished reading the first in the Earth Chronicles series, and - as someone who's always loved ancient history - it seems to make such a lot of sense.
Why did, for over a million years, our 'ancestors' just use a simple stone as a tool, then it took another million for them to learn how to 'chip away' at the stone and shape it. Then, approximately 23,000 years ago, we learned how to make tools out of all kinds of material, build stupendous temples and temple-like structures and learned farming ad animal husbandry and we now keep sending up satelittles into space - and why are we so vastly different to our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees, when according to all evolutionary theories, we should still be knuckle walking and living in the African savannahs, even if we have lost most of our body hair.
Something doesn't smell right in the halls of science and I'd like to thank Mr Sitchin for bringing many of these same points to the publics attention, when academia is so obviously determined to dig a bit hole and hide all the evidence in it.
Good read.