HELL–FIRE AND FLOOD
Once animals, gods and mortals lived together in peace and harmony within the Airyana Vaejah, the great Iranian Expanse. Here, in a tranquil garden of flowing streams, abundant crops and verdant landscapes as far as the eye could see, there were golden summers for seven months, and mild winters during the rest of the year.
Then something terrible happened. Everything changed. The heavenly garden became an inhospitable wasteland of ten months' winter and just two months' summer. This onslaught of the land was blamed on Angra Mainyu, the Wicked Spirit, who wanted to bring death and destruction to the earth. Animals and humans died amid the freezing temperatures of the 'fatal winter'. Great plagues raged among those who survived the freezing cold, which seemed to penetrate everything and everywhere. The air was as cold as the waters, which were as cold as the earth, which was as cold as the trees. And all the time snow fell constantly.
The earth became a horrible place.
Fortunately, Ahura Mazda, the Good Spirit, had been able to warn the fair-faced Yima, the good shepherd of high renown, of the approach of this time of darkness when the 'vehement destroying frost' would engulf the land.1He had also warned him that 'all three sorts of beasts shall perish, those that live in the wilderness, and those that live on the tops of the mountains, and those that live in the depths of the valleys under the shelter of stables.2
In order that Yima should be able to save the animal kingdom and the righteous among mortal kind, Ahura Mazda had informed him to: 'make thee a var the length of a riding ground to all four corners. Thither bring thou the representatives of every kind of beast, great and small, of the cattle, of the beasts of burden, and of men, of dogs, of birds, and of the red burning fires'.3
Inside this var Yima was told to 'make water flow' so that he could place 'birds in the trees along the water's edge, in verdure which is everlasting '. Here, too, he was also to plant examples of all greenery and fruits. So long as all these things remained firmly inside the var the good shepherd was told that they 'shall not perish'.4
Finally, after a great many generations, the 'vehement destroying frost' passed away, and Yima was able to lead the Iranian people and the animal kingdom out of the var and back into the world outside. The plants and fruits were also returned to the light and these grew again with renewed vigour. So the world was saved through the instigation of fair Yima, the son of Tahmuras, who was the greatest ever king of Iran and all the world.
This is the story of Yima as told in the Avestan literature of Zoroastrian tradition, which perhaps dates back as early as the sixth century BC (see Chapters Seven and Eight). Yima may be compared with the righteous Noah, the flood hero of Hebraic tradition, although the Iranian account bears many contrasting differences to its biblical counterpart. To start with, there is no flood, and secondly, instead of Yima constructing a huge sea-going vessel in which he houses the animal kingdom and his immediate family, he is instructed by Ahura Mazda to make a var, a word meaning a subterranean fortress or city. Strangely enough, in Persia the term ark, the word used to describe Noah's vessel, actually means 'citadel' or 'fortress'.5
Yima constructed the var in order that the Iranian race could survive the 'vehement frost', the freezing conditions and the perpetual snow that was said to have accompanied the 'fatal winter' that raged in the world during this mythical age. So what was going on here, and when might these events have taken place in recorded history?
There seems little doubt that the so-called 'fatal winter' preserved in Iranian literature refers to the final onslaught of the last Ice Age, which began around 15,000 BC and ended in the Near East perhaps as late as 8500–8300 BC.6 That the Iranian race might have preserved some primordial memory of the last Ice Age was difficult enough to handle, but the idea that their most distant ancestors had constructed a vast underground fortress to escape the climatic attack seemed even more extraordinary.
The description of Yima's var bore so many similarities to the subterranean world beneath the plains of Cappadocia that some kind of relationship between the two seemed apparent. For instance, in the var's 'upper part', Ahura Mazda instructed the fairfaced king to 'layout nine avenues; in the middle, six; in the lower part, three',7 giving a total of eighteen main streets. The Wise Lord further added that: 'In the streets of the upper part thou shalt place one thousand couples, men and women; six hundred in the streets of the middle part; three hundred in the streets of the lower part.'8 This gave a total of 1,900 couples, or 3,800 adults; the text says nothing of children or relatives. This count makes a slight difference to the eight people saved by Noah on the Ark!
Ahura Mazda also says that 'over the var thou shalt open a window for the light',9 words that made me recall the openings and air-shafts of the underground citadels of Cappadocia.
So where had Yima's var been placed? Do the texts say?
Sadly not. Yet since the var was said to have been located in the Airyana Vaejah, the domain of the immortals and the place of origin of the Iranian race, then it had almost certainly been situated somewhere in the vicinity of Kurdistan.
Might the var have been located in the mountains?
I felt it unlikely. There has always been a transmigrational relationship between the peoples of the Kurdish and Armenian highlands and those who live on the plains of eastern Anatolia, and vice versa. In fact, Cappadocia was actually considered to have been a satellite region of Kurdistan right down until the sixteenth century, when it was finally lost to the Turkish empire.10 This meant there was every likelihood that if the Cappadocian underground cities really did date back to late palaeolithic times, then they could easily have become the subject of myths and legends that filtered into Iranian mythology via the oral traditions of eastern Kurdistan.
Leaving specific locations aside for one moment, it might well be the case that Yima's var was never intended to be seen as an actual underground citadel, merely a symbol of how the Iranian people had survived the onslaught of the geological upheavals and climatic changes that had apparently heralded the end of the last Ice Age. In this way there could have been any number of underground fortresses that would all have constituted the var spoken of in Iranian literature, whether they had been placed in Cappadocia, Kurdistan or Iran itself.
Beneath the Ice
Was it really possible that certain cultures had gone underground during the final stages of the last Ice Age? The evidence from Çatal Hüyük would certainly suggest that the earliest ancestors of this culture had once lived in this manner. If so, then what might life have been like for the late palaeolithic inhabitants of eastern Anatolia? For painfully long periods, fierce snow blizzards would have swept across the plains, bringing arctic-like conditions. This would have meant that only the toughest animals, or the most resilient of humans, could have survived in the open air for any length of time. Those with any forethought of these coming climatic changes could quite conceivably have constructed vast underground citadels in the softest volcanic rock, even though this would have meant living in constant fear of the active volcanoes.
Underground temperatures would have remained relatively constant, probably around 7–8°C. This would have meant that anyone could have lived quite comfortably without the use of open fires for any length of time, provided, of course, they wore plenty of clothing. The storage of food during milder periods would have enabled the population to suitably nourish itself on a regular basis, although these provisions would have needed to be supplemented by hunting expeditions across the snow and ice. In this manner underground life could have continued ad infinitum. The only signs to suggest that the complex was even there would probably have been a ring of defensive spikes, possibly topped with banners and animal skulls, and, of course, the monolith-marked ventilation shafts.
Fantasy? Perhaps. Yet there is compelling evidence from around the globe to suggest that during the final phases of the last Ice Age something immensely catastrophic really did force its inhabitants either to take cover or to climb to the top of the highest mountain. Moreover, these cataclysmic events had not been confined to the Near East. They would appear to have occurred in one form or another in almost every country of the world, and to have been preserved in the myths and legends of literally hundreds of different cultures. Yet before I go on to describe what appears to have taken place, we need a few words on the history of the last Ice Age.
According to geologists, enormous ice sheets and glaciers enveloped most of North America and Europe for a period of anything between 30,000 and 50,000 years. Yet then, for some unapparent reason, they started to recede during the eleventh millennium BC. In a matter of just two to three thousand years the ice sheets vanished completely, bringing to a close not only the Ice Age, but also the geological era known as the Pleistocene epoch. This great thaw coincided with a gradual rise in the surface temperature over much of the western hemisphere, which, although accounting for the melt-down of the ice sheets, in no way explains exactly why the Ice Age came to a close. Indeed, geologists and palaeo-climatologists have very little idea how ice ages form, why they occur only in certain regions and why they suddenly go away.
Catastrophic Death
Elsewhere in the world during this same period there are clear indications of dramatic changes going on in regions which were not affected by the ice sheets. For instance, sometime during the eleventh millennium BC in the northern parts of Siberia literally thousands of animals, mammoths in particular, simply froze to death.11 Many were found still standing upright with grass in their mouths and stomachs, indicating that they had been eating at the moment when their fate was sealed. Some of those studied revealed that their frozen skin still contained red blood corpuscles, hinting strongly at the fact that death had been caused through suffocation, either by water or by gases. It is to be remembered that, contrary to popular belief, woolly mammoths did not live in arctic conditions. They inhabited more temperate zones where grasslands and wet boggy forests prevailed.
In the 'mud' pits of Alaska, Professor Frank C. Hibben, a renowned palaeontologist, discovered extensive evidence to show that tens of thousands of animals had suddenly met with a most hideous fate, for as he remarks in his 1946 work, The Lost Americans:
In the dark gray frozen stuff is preserved, quite commonly, fragments of ligaments, skin, hair, and even flesh . . . The evidences of violence there are as obvious as in the horror camps of Germany. Such piles of bodies of animals or men simply do not occur by any ordinary natural means.12. . . Mammoth and bison alike were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in Godly rage. In one place, we can find the foreleg and shoulder of a mammoth with portions of the flesh and the toenails and the hair still clinging to the blackened bones. Close by is the neck and skull of a bison with the vertebrae clinging together with tendons and ligaments and the chitinous covering of the horns intact . . . The animals were simply torn apart and scattered over the landscape like things of straw and string, even though some of them weighed several tons. Mixed with the piles of bones are trees, also twisted and torn and piled in tangled groups; and the whole is covered with fine sifting muck, then frozen solid.13
Violent volcanic upheavals have been blamed for the tremendous ferocity behind the mass destruction of the Pleistocene animals, particularly in Alaska. Evidence of this theory has come from blackened layers of volcanic ash in both the Alaskan and Siberian regions.14 Yet there seems to have been far more to it than simply this. Hibben estimated that over 40 million animals had died in the continent of America alone, while many species – such as giant beaver and sloths, mammoths, mastodons, sabre-tooth cats and woolly rhinoceroses – had become extinct almost overnight.15 For him:
The Pleistocene period ended in death. This is no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all-inclusive . . . The large animals that had given their name to the period became extinct. Their death marked the end of an era.16
All around the world there is also overwhelming evidence to show that, while the old ice-caps were melting, new ones were taking their place. The continent of Antarctica, for instance, began its gradual glaciation towards the end of the last Ice Age and was still relatively free of ice in certain regions right down until 4000 BC. Other evidence indicates that a short relapse, a kind of mini-ice age, where the ice sheets began advancing once more, occurred in Europe and Asia Minor sometime between 11,000 to 10,000 years ago.17 More curious is evidence from locations as far apart as northern Armenia18 and the Andean Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru, not only of the extinction of animals during the eleventh and tenth millennia BC, but also of dramatic elevations in the terrain's altitude above sea level.19
Receding ice-caps, mass animal extinction, geological upheavals, climatic changes and the raising of the earth – what had happened to the planet to cause such global catastrophes? Geologists have no real theories and palaeo-climatologists simply rub their chins and try to ignore the evidence staring them in the face. So what is the answer?
Hapgood's Answer
The most sober theory that fits the majority of the evidence was first put forward in 1955 by the late Charles Hapgood, Professor of Geology at Keene State College, Keene, New Hampshire, and endorsed at the time by no less a personage than Albert Einstein. Hapgood noted that studies of rocks recording the magnetic poles at the moment of their solidification showed how, since the beginning of geological history, the geographical poles have shifted their position as many as two hundred times – sixteen shifts occurring during the Quaternary or Pleistocene epoch alone.20
The phenomenon of poles shifting or reversing is no big deal to geologists. They, however, attempt to explain away these changes in terms of a theory known as continental drift, something most of us will have learnt about in geography class. This is where vast continents are seen to slide around on the soft layers of magma which exist some thirty to forty miles below the earth's outer shell, its so-called Crystal Lithosphere. Using the continental drift theory to explain shifts and/or reversals in the poles' axis did not, in Hapgood's opinion, explain many of the global upheavals believed to have accompanied such changes. As a consequence, he concluded that although continental drift must be involved in the process of pole shifting, at the point when this occurs the whole outer shell of the earth buckles and slides in unison. If you can imagine the whole outer peel of an orange turning as the inner core of juicy segments remains immobile, this will give some idea of what earth crust displacement apparently looks like.
This all-encompassing turning motion would lead to a slow shift of the earth's axis relative to its surface, as well as the disappearance of the old polar ice-caps and the appearance of new ones in areas that had previously experienced more temperate climates. Hapgood concluded that crustal displacement had almost certainly taken place on at least three occasions during the past 100,000 years, this explaining the various periods of glaciation in corresponding regions of the globe at different times. Each slip would have caused a series of tremendous upheavals, followed by a period of relative calm, then another series of upheavals, followed by another period of calm, and so on and so forth, for anything up to several thousand years until the shift was complete.
More importantly, Hapgood also felt that crustal displacement caused dramatic changes in land elevation relative to sea level.21 Such changes in altitude and/or climate must have taken place in many parts of the world, each bringing with them not only the extinction of many animals but also, presumably, catastrophic geological upheavals such as volcanic eruptions, major earthquakes and, quite inevitably, tidal waves and mass flooding on an unimaginable scale. Moreover, as a secondary effect, volcanic dust would have been cast into the air, causing sudden drops in air temperature. This in turn would have created increased rainfalls, drowning many more animals, while violent gales and tornadoes would have wreaked even further devastation.
Hapgood concluded from the available evidence on the Pleistocene epoch that, from around 50,000 to around 17,000 years ago, the northern polar cap had been located somewhere in the area of Hudson Bay in Canada, while the southern polar cap had been placed in the Australian Antarctic Territory, somewhere off Wilkes Coast in the Pacific Ocean. Since little sunlight reaches polar regions, and that which does is too weak to have any noticeable effect on the climate, large areas of North America had experienced ice sheets up to two miles thick. Then, at a date he placed at around 15,000 BC, a great shift took place in the earth's crust. Why, exactly, this should have happened Hapgood could not say; but the consequence was that North America 'slid' southwards, taking with it the whole western hemisphere, while on the other side of the globe the eastern hemisphere was equally tilted northwards.
Fig. 16. Photograph taken at an unknown Mayan site in the Yucatan by explorer Teobert Maler (1842–1917) of a stone frieze showing a Noah-like figure escaping a deluge, as a volcano erupts and a cyclopean structure collapses. Does this relief show the cataclysms that accompanied the cessation of the last Ice Age, c. 10,500–9000 BC?
This global shift resulted in the northern pole moving a full 30 degrees, or 2,000 miles (3,200 km), to its current position in the Arctic Circle – which was then relatively free of ice. At the same time the southern pole shifted 2,000 miles on to the continent of Antarctica. Because of the severe lack of sunlight, polar regions act like vast refrigerators, creating cold icy wastes that eventually allow the formation of new ice-caps.22
Meanwhile, the upper parts of the eastern hemisphere, such as Siberia and Alaska, which had unexpectedly found themselves much closer to the northern pole, would have begun experiencing unprecedented geological upheavals and harsh arctic conditions of the sort that led to the mass extinction of the animals already noted.
Hapgood believed that the earth's last crustal displacement would have taken a period of approximately five thousand years to complete, giving an end-date around 10,000 BC – a time-frame fitting very well with the climate changes known to have occurred in the Near East during this epoch.
An outline of the crustal displacement theory subsequently appeared in two essential books penned by Hapgood – Earth's Shifting Crust, published in 1958 (later revised and republished in 1970 as The Path of the Pole), and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, first published in 1966. Each book suitably explained much of what occurred towards the end of the last Ice Age, and this I wholly accepted. Yet could the effects of crustal displacement also explain why the population of Asia Minor would appear to have gone underground? Was it simply because of the arctic conditions outside, or could there have been other, more pressing reasons for them to have hidden themselves away?
Fire from Heaven
Stories of what would appear to have been a fiery conflagration, followed, or preceded, by a universal flood, abound in myths and legends found throughout the world. For instance, in the Popol-Vuh, the sacred text of the Quiché Indians of Guatemala, there is a graphic account of violent catastrophes on a grand scale, for it tells us that:
The waters were agitated by the will of Hurakan, the Heart of Heaven, and a great inundation came . . . Masses of a sticky material [pitch] fell . . . The face of the Earth was obscured, and a heavy darkening rain began. It rained by day, and it rained by night . . . There was heard a great noise above, as if by fire. Now men were seen running, pushing each other, filled with despair. They wished to climb upon their houses, but the houses, tumbling down, fill to the ground. They wished to hide in caves, but the caves caved in before them . . . Water and fire contributed to the universal ruin at the time of the last great cataclysm which preceded the Fourth Creation.23
The Quiché also record that: 'Terrific rains and hailstorms and a fall of burning pitch . . . made life so hard that the survivors, four men and four women, decided to take refuge somewhere else, where caves promised a better protection.'24
Many of the indigenous tribes of North America also speak of some distant epoch in their ancestral history when 'the waters rose to quench a Great Fire which raged in the world.'25 According to one tradition recorded by the Sacs and Foxes – Indians of Algonkian stock who settled in Iowa and Oklahoma:
. . . long ago two powerful manitous felt themselves insulted by the hero Wisaka. This put them into a fearful passion, and, intending to kill their enemy, they raged and roared over the Earth which heaved and shook under their angry steps. They threw fire everywhere where they thought Wisaka was hidden. Then they sent a great rain. The waters rose and Wisaka had to leave his hiding-place. He climbed a high peak, and then a high tree on the top of that peak, and at last, when all the Earth had disappeared under the waters, he saved himself in a canoe.26
Yet for me the most convincing story is that preserved by the Yurucaré of Bolivia. They remember a time:
When, long ago, the demon Aymasune destroyed plants, animals and man, by causing fire to fall from heaven, one man, who had foreseen the catastrophe, had richly victualled a cave to which he withdrew when the fire-hail started. To see if the fire was still raging he now and then held a long rod out of the mouth of the cave. Twice he found it charred, but the third time it was cool. He waited another four days before he left his shelter.27
There is a certain realism about this legend from the Yurucaré that somehow struck a nerve. Who would want to make up such a peculiar story if it had no basis in truth? Sticking a long rod out of a cave entrance to find out whether or not the 'fire-hail' had diminished is a very strange tale to interpret in a mythological context alone. Might it have been aerial bombardments of this sort that the peoples of eastern Anatolia had been attempting to escape when they built their underground cities? If so, then were they volcanic in origin? Might this link with the veneration of the volcano among the protoneolithic peoples of Çatal Hüyük?
Memories of fire and flood in primordial times were not confined to the Americas either. They could also be traced in myths and legends belonging to the ancient races of Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand and India. Furthermore, there were clear stories from Hebraic tradition concerning a fiery conflagration that apparently accompanied the traditional Great Flood of Noah, as the following passage demonstrates:
When men saw the waters well forth from the fountains of the deep they took their children, of whom they had many, and pressed them to the mouths of the fountains without mercy. Then the Lord let a deluge descend from above. But they were strong and tall. When the Lord saw that neither the fountains of the deep nor the deluge of heaven could undo them he caused a rain of fire to fall from heaven which annihilated them all.28
This Jewish story about God's attempt to purge the earth of its antediluvian inhabitants, who are portrayed here as sinful giants, brought me back to the alleged destruction of the Watchers and Nephilim by fire and flood. Was it possible that the Watchers of Kurdistan had existed during the final phases of the last Ice Age? Enochian literature, particularly that found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, states quite clearly that 'those two hundred demons (Watchers) fought a hard battle with the four [arch]angels, until the angels used fire, naphtha, and brimstone . . .',29 during which 'four hundred thousand Righteous' people were killed.30 Elsewhere it states that, in the dream experienced by the two Nephilim sons of Shemyaza, they see the terrestrial Garden of Paradise – which contained the two hundred 'trees', or Watchers – destroyed by 'all the waters; and the fire burned all'.31
It seems very possible that these references to a heavenly fire, refer red to in connection with the Great Flood, must relate to the global cataclysms that heralded the end of the last Ice Age.
The Fires of Hell
For some reason the punishment of heavenly fire sent by the archangels to destroy the wickedness of the Watchers and their Nephilim offspring is not found in the biblical account of the Flood. Academics would argue that the Book of Enoch, as well as the other Enochian and Dead Sea material, is of a much later date than the Pentateuch of Moses, implying that these accounts of heavenly conflagrations are simply much later embellishments of an original theme. I disagree entirely with this view, for there seems every good reason to argue that it was the Book of Genesis that was heavily influenced by the stories found in the earliest Enochian literature, not the other way around.
The idea of punishment by fire, however, was not ignored by the Jewish faith. It seems to have lingered on in the imaginations of the Jewish race until it finally reappeared in the guise of Gehenna, the Valley of Fire, in which the wicked would writhe tormented in flames. Here, too, the two hundred fallen angels had been cast following their expulsion from heaven.
Although Gehenna was geographically linked with a place of this name just outside Jerusalem where the city's rubbish was incinerated, the concept itself is much older. Moreover, Gehenna was linked with the Jewish belief in a great 'pit' or 'walled city' referred to as Sheol.32 Also known as 'the land of forgetfulness'33 and the 'land of silence', it was said that no god rules Sheol and the dead are forgotten by Yahweh.
In early Christian times the Jewish belief in Gehenna and Sheol was fused together with the Greek concept of an underworld realm named Hades, or Tartarus, before being transformed into the idea of hell – the place of eternal punishment. As has tended to be rammed into every good Christian from an early age, hell is a gloomy realm of devilish flames and burning brimstone, where fiery heat is the only illumination and the wicked live on in perpetual torment. Somehow the fusion of all these different ideas led to the belief that the fallen angels also now reside in hell. Here, under the command of Lucifer, they are in charge of punishing the sinners and unbelievers once they have departed this world.
The concept of hell became very popular in Christian beliefs from the fourth century onwards, when it was seized upon and used to instil the fear of God among church-goers. Anyone who turned their back on the Church of Rome would be cast into the fiery abyss to suffer eternal damnation. In medieval times hell gained its greatest popularity, especially in art and literature Dante's Inferno being a prime example. So vivid a picture of the fiery domains did he paint that simple-minded folk actually believed he must have visited hell himself! Strange, then, that among the various torments and tortures portrayed in Dante's Inferno is a fiery hail that rains down upon the wicked.
Hell is the creation of the Christian Church, based on earlier beliefs adopted from both Jewish and Greek sources. The only hell that has ever existed is the one created by our own minds. Its true origin would seem to have stemmed from the bastardized memories of a time long ago when our most distant ancestors spent long periods of time in darkened underground citadels, sheltering from severe climatic conditions and fierce geological upheavals, including aerial bombardments of fiery hail expelled from the mouths of violent volcanoes.
Far-fetched? Maybe. Yet the only alternative is to assume that hell exists, and this solution has, in my view, no real evidence in its favour.
Two Floods?
There were certain unanswered questions that needed to be addressed before I could leave behind the subject of global cataclysms and move on to find the true homeland of the Watchers. If the story of the Anannage presented in the Kharsag tablets really did reflect events that had taken place in the highlands of Kurdistan (or, indeed, anywhere else in the Near East), then how was I to explain the apparent sequence of severe climatic changes, including periods of darkness, arctic-like conditions and severe flooding, that had supposedly occurred towards the end of the settlement's long history (see Chapter Fifteen)? When might these have taken place?
If the events at Kharsag were linked in some way with the geological upheavals and climatic changes taking place around the end of the last Ice Age, it suggests that this advanced community must have been established long before the eleventh millenium BC, which makes no sense at all.
The Ice Age solution also fails to account for the universal flood preserved in the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian literature of the second and first millennia BC. Like their biblical counterpart, they place an emphasis on water raining down from the heavens as opposed to water levels simply rising steadily upwards, as would have been the case with the melting of the polar caps. The Ice Age explanation also fails to explain why the Yezidi tribes of Kurdistan, who emphasize their descent from the flood hero, seem certain that there were two deluges – the last of these being the Flood of Noah, which they say occurred seven thousand years ago.34
How on earth was I to reconcile these clear contradictions? The only logical explanation is to suggest there were in fact two quite distinct periods of climatic upheaval in the Near East – the first around the end of the last Ice Age, say between 10,500–9000 BC, and the second around 5000 BC, the date preserved quite specifically by the Yezidi. Unfortunately, there is very little evidence that any such climatic changes took place around this second date, although there is one possible solution, and this is Woolley's flood.
Between 1929 and 1934, Sir Leonard Woolley, while excavating a series of 'test-pits' on the site of the ancient city of Ur in Lower Iraq, dug through several occupational levels before unexpectedly coming across 'eleven feet of clean, water-laid silt', virtually clear of any obvious remains.35 Immediately above and below this level were identifiable traces of the 'Ubaid culture who inhabited Lower Iraq between 4500 and 4000 BC. This suggested that at some point between these two dates, possibly slightly earlier (the 'Ubaid people were in northern Iraq as early as 5000 BC), some kind of localized deluge overran the region. Then, once the waters had receded, the land was left covered with a thick deposit of silt, which on hardening was reoccupied by the 'Ubaid people.
Perhaps inevitably, Woolley became somewhat excited by this tantalizing discovery and concluded that it constituted firm evidence of the Great Flood, which had in itself been heavily influenced by its earlier Mesopotamian counterparts. Sadly, this was not to be the case, for at other test-pits made on the site of the city of Eridu, just fifteen miles from Ur, no trace of any silt deposit was to be found, despite the land being even lower in this area.36 Confusing the issue even further was the fact that in test-pits dug at the city of Kish, a 'flood level' of silt was found, although this time it appeared in a much later historical context, perhaps as late as the first half of the third millennium BC. Much thinner alluvial deposits were also found at the cities of Uruk, Lagash and Shuruppak, Utnapishtim's own home city.37 This contradictory evidence of inundations from all over Lower Iraq therefore implied that the plains had been subject to localized flooding at various stages in their history, suggesting that the collective memory of these individual events had somehow been impressed upon flood myths from a much earlier date, perhaps around the end of the last Ice Age.
Such a solution has its shortcomings, and it may well be that more extensive evidence of major flooding during the 'Ubaid period lies waiting to be discovered beneath the sun-scorched sands of Iraq. This hypothesis does, however, make better sense of our knowledge of the Anannage's settlement in the mountains of Kurdistan. The introduction of a second period of climatic changes, including mass flooding, might therefore explain why Kharsag would appear to have suffered from severe climatic conditions towards the end of its recorded history – the period between 6000–5000 BC being suggested by Christian O'Brien.
This same confusion, I believe, is behind the Yezidi belief in two floods having taken place. It also explains how the Watchers of Hebraic tradition were able to establish themselves in Eden and then, after an unspecified period of time, suffer destruction at the time of the second flood, the Flood of Noah, plausibly around 5000 BC. It is also possible that great numbers of their Nephilim offspring were killed during the localized flooding, which would appear to have engulfed the low-lying plains of ancient Iraq in the middle of the 'Ubaid period.
Even if the extent of the second flood has been grossly exaggerated in myth and legend, it now provides us with workable dates for both the rise and fall of the Watchers. It would appear that the settlement of Eden/Kharsag had been established sometime towards the end of the last Ice Age, say 9500–9000 BC. It had then continued in relative isolation until some kind of split appears to have taken place among its inhabitants. This led to a large number of the Watchers/Anannage – two hundred in the Hebrew accounts, six hundred in the Sumerian texts – descending on to the surrounding plains and living among humanity. The chances are that this occurred around the time of the establishment of the first pre-Sumerian city-state of Eridu, c. 5500 BC. This would then seem to have been followed by a series of more localized climatic catastrophes, c. 5000–4500 BC. From then onwards there would seem to have been two opposing camps of Anannage, or Watchers – one in the mountainous 'heaven of Anu' and the other 'in the earth', i.e. on the plains of Mesopotamia. This last faction would appear to have provided the impetus for the later Assyrian and Babylonian legends concerning the underground race of great stature and vampiric tendencies known as the Edimmu.
Should this chronology prove correct, then we may also conclude that, if biblical patriarchs such as Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech and Noah really had existed as historical personages, they could well have lived any time between 5500 and 4500 BC, when the split or 'fall' among the Anannage, or Watchers, is thought to have taken place, and the second 'Flood of Noah' may well have occurred.
I was now pretty confident that the angels of heaven, and the Watchers of the Enochian and Dead Sea literature, had been a unique culture which had seriously influenced the foundation of civilization in the Near East from its earliest phases right down until the third millennium BC. The evidence was, I felt, too strong simply to dismiss out of hand. I knew what they looked like, where they had lived, the effect they had left on humanity, and how they had been perceived by the other developing cultures of the age. Yet still I had no idea of who they were, or where they might have come from. Had their ancestors constructed the underground cities of Cappadocia? Had they afterwards followed the course of the Euphrates as it curves through eastern Anatolia, before finally turning eastwards towards its headwaters close to Lake Van in Turkish Kurdistan? Or had they come from somewhere else – somewhere not yet in the picture?
It was time to reach even further back in time to find out whether there was any evidence which might suggest that the Watchers had been a remnant of a much more significant race that existed before the cessation of the last Ice Age. It was a clue from a most unlikely source which finally pointed me in the right direction.