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Oannes: The "Best Evidence" for Ancient Aliens?

11/7/2012

15 Comments

 
Monday on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Philip Coppens discussed Ancient Aliens Debunked and the “very clever” ways Chris White attempted to make criticism of Ancient Aliens: The Series as synonymous with debunking the ancient astronaut hypothesis as a whole. Coppens specifically told host Joe Rogan that White’s biggest omission was his failure to address the Babylonian tale of Oannes (which he mistakenly claims was known to the Sumerians; this cannot be proved). Coppens claims this story is the “amongst the best evidence that we might have potentially been visited by” extraterrestrials in prehistory.

Coppens told Rogan:

Quote
You should really try to negate this if you want to pretend that you have completely destroyed the ancient alien theory. You can try to attack the Ancient Aliens series, but as long as you don’t go for the best evidence, like the Oannes story, and you do it on a scientific level, you kind of like, you argue why Carl Sagan thought this was interesting, why other scientists thought this was interesting, then you can make a documentary and pretend that you have completely destroyed the possibility that we were ever visited in the past by ancient aliens, but you haven’t.

OK. Fair point. So let’s look at Oannes to see just why this Babylonian fish-man is not an ancient astronaut. Fair warning: Because Coppens identified this issue as essential to the ancient alien hypothesis, this post is very long.

The story of Oannes is told only by Berossus, a late Babylonian priest who related the tale in his Babylonian History, which does not survive. Summaries were made by Apollodorus, Abydenus, and Alexander Polyhistor, but of course none of these survive either. Extracts from these Greek summaries were recorded in Late Antiquity by Eusebius of Caesaria and in the Middle Ages by George Syncellus, whose books are the sole surviving record of Berossus’ work. We know Berossus existed because he is mentioned by other writers, such as Pliny, whose work survives. (Unrelated fragments of Berossus’ astronomical works were also preserved by Seneca.)

But this isn’t the end of the story. The Greek fragments of Berossus are known to modern readers in the form given them in the early 1800s by I. P. Cory, whose Ancient Fragments (an edition of which I recently edited) freely ran together material from Eusebius and Syncellus while excising the presumed contributions of the Greek authors to produce relatively linear narratives. (I have made this text available online here.) These fragments were further adapted by Robert Temple, who published them in the appendix to his Sirius Mystery from Richard Hodge’s 1876 revision of Cory’s Fragments. This is the form of Berossus’ work ancient astronaut hypothesizers know.

Now, Berossus is generally an accurate writer, but the form of his work that comes down to us does not perfectly match cuneiform records where such records exist. For example, the Greek summarizers make Berossus state that Belus (Marduk) “cut off his own head, upon which the other gods mixed the blood, as it gushed out, with the earth; and from thence men were formed.” However, the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, differs on this detail in the cuneiform text. In tablet six, Marduk decrees that the god Kingu must be beheaded and his blood used by Ea to create man. Now, had the work of Berossus—a priest of Marduk—come down to us perfectly, it is very unlikely we should see such a profound mischaracterization of a sacred act of the god himself. As a result of such mistakes, we simply cannot be certain that the Oannes passage is uncorrupted.

Nevertheless, reading the passage on Berossus as it currently stands gives us no confidence that it describes an extraterrestrial. In fact, it says nothing about outer space at all:

Quote
At Babylon there was (in these times) a great resort of people of various nations, who inhabited Chaldæa, and lived in a lawless manner like the beasts of the field. In the first year there appeared, from that part of the Erythræan sea which borders upon Babylonia, an animal destitute of reason, by name Oannes, whose whole body (according to the account of Apollodorus) was that of a fish; that under the fish's head he had another head, with feet also below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day.

This Being was accustomed to pass the day among men; but took no food at that season; and he gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge. He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and shewed them how to collect the fruits; in short, he instructed them in every thing which could tend to soften manners and humanize their lives. From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. And when the sun had set, this Being Oannes, retired again into the sea, and passed the night in the deep; for he was amphibious. After this there appeared other animals like Oannes, of which Berossus proposes to give an account when he comes to the history of the kings.

Such legends prompted Carl Sagan to write in the 1960s that “stories like the Oannes legend, and representations especially of the earliest civilizations on Earth, deserve much more critical studies than have been performed heretofore, with the possibility of direct contact with an extraterrestrial civilization as one of many possible alternative explanations.” Sagan later discounted this when he learned more about myths and legends and why they are unreliable.

Note that contra Coppens, Berossus clearly states that this event happened at Babylon (not Sumer), which was only founded in 1894 BCE, many centuries after the arts and sciences the creature claimed to bring with him were already in use at Sumer, Eridu, and Ur. (You can claim Berossus is wrong here, but if so, why trust anything else?) Note, too, that Oannes is described as a fish-man (and depicted in “literal” ancient art as a man in a giant fish suit) who lives in and returns to the sea. This is not outer space, and the only reason anyone ever thought it had anything to do with space is because at one particular moment in history—the 1960s and ’70s, when Sagan and Temple wrote—spacecraft routinely “splashed down” in the ocean, thus leading to an erroneous—and artificial—assumption of a connection between space and water. 

Picture
Seriously, a man in a fish suit.
But the story is hardly unique. In the book of 1 Enoch (7:1-8:4), the Fallen Angels do exactly as Oannes and his brethren did:

Quote
VII. 1. And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. 2. And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: 3. Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, 4. the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. 5. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood. 6. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

VIII. 1. And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures. 2. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, (taught) astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations, Ezêqêêl the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiêl the signs of the earth, Shamsiêl the signs of the sun, and Sariêl the course of the moon. And as men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven . . . (trans. R. H. Charles)

The Hebrews got the better end of the deal, apparently, since Azazel gave them makeup and jewelry in addition to boring things like seeds and math.

Nor is 1 Enoch the only parallel. Osiris, in his role as civilizer of Egypt, did exactly the same thing, as recorded in Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 13.1:

Quote
One of the first acts related of Osiris in his reign was to deliver the Egyptians from their destitute and brutish manner of living. This he did by showing them the fruits of cultivation, by giving them laws, and by teaching them to honour the gods. Later he travelled over the whole earth civilizing it without the slightest need of arms, but most of the peoples he won over to his way by the charm of his persuasive discourse combined with song and all manner of music. Hence the Greeks came to identify him with Dionysus. (trans. Frank Cole Babbitt)

Now, you can be like Atlantis theorizers and assume that these are all independent stories of civilizing agents coming from a lost civilization (Graham Hancock does) or an ancient astronaut hypothesizer proclaiming them all aliens. (That the same evidence is found in both claims does little to boost our confidence in the correctness of either.) But I think it should be fairly obvious that this is a widespread cultural myth of the “civilizing hero” to whom the various accomplishments of society are retroactively attributed. Wikipedia lists dozens upon dozens of such heroes, for example, and their list is incomplete.

Now, if we might like some facts about Oannes—which, of course, spoil the fun—we can begin by noting that Oannes isn’t his real name. This is a Greek rendering of Uanna, a name found in the cuneiform Library of Ashurbanipal as an alternate name for the better-known hero Adapa, whose oldest reference dates from 1335 BCE at Amarna in Egypt, in cuneiform materials supplied to Akhenaten. This figure was held to be the (human) son of Ea (Sumerian: Enki), the man who brought civilization to Eridu and who broke the wings of the wind when it overturned his boat. He later was tricked out of immortality but took his place among the Seven Sages. “Ea,” the tablets state, “anointed Adapa … to fish for his temple in Eridu.”

The word used for “sage” comes from the Sumerian for “Great Water,” thus associating Adapa-Oannes with the sea, as Berossus seems to have confusedly remembered, an association strengthened by the memory that Eridu had been located at the head of the Persian Gulf, where Oannes supposedly operated. In the Erra and Ishum, the Seven Sages are banished to the underground sea, the Apsu, the home of Adapa’s father Ea, because they angered the gods (cf. Fallen Angels). From this watery abyss, whose entrance was believed to be beneath Ea’s temple at Eridu, they became described as “pure puradu-fish,” a type of carp still held sacred in the region, thus yielding the literalized description of Oannes as a hybrid fish-man, when hero and symbol became identified. (This is like the way Jesus is sometimes depicted as the Lamb of God, or Moses with ram’s horns.)

In short, Berossus’ description (as related by the Greeks) is a very late, somewhat confused synthesis of the earlier myths of a human hero who was banished to the underground sea (which of course does not actually exist), took a fish as his symbol, and returned from the sea to teach wisdom. It’s worth noting that Adapa is paired in myth with Tammuz, another who ended up in the underworld (this time the realm of the dead) and returned.

Since we can trace in historical texts and iconography the evolution of Adapa from human figure in the ancient Library of Ashurbanipal (as well as at Akhenaten’s city of Amarna!) to fish-man much, much later in Berossus, and from banished sage to risen denizen of the waters, we have no warrant for assuming the final, jumbled Greek summaries of Berossus are in any way historical. If the Babylonians failed to tell Akhenaten that Adapa was an alien from space in 1335 BCE, or their own king in the 600s BCE, why should we trust a demonstrably corrupt Greek summary of a text written centuries later?

This is the “best evidence” of ancient astronauts?

15 Comments
Tara Jordan
11/7/2012 11:29:03 pm

Jason,I enjoy reading your blog, but with all due respect,although you do a superb job as a debunker, I`m feeling more & more uncomfortable with your approach (should I call it selective or sherry picking approach?). I consider to be both necessary & intellectually hygienic to debunk fringe beliefs,but the process must be as deontological and rigorous as possible.You cannot cite & rely on individual like Chris White, since White is disingenuous & dishonest as the rest of the Ancient Aliens snake oil doctors brigade.Chris White believes in the divine inspiration and literal interpretation of ancient biblical texts,& more than often uses delusions,deceptions,omissions & sheer lies to make his point. I am not obsessed with Chris White,but I am surprised you failed to be concerned by the irony of having religious zealots debunking New Age cuckoos. White cannot have it both ways, debunking a particular magical & superstitious beliefs system,in favor of his own.

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/7/2012 11:38:38 pm

Tara, I didn't cite or rely on Chris White at all. All of the research in this post is my own and has nothing to do with Chris White. I am specifically examining Coppens' claim that Oannes is the best evidence for ancient aliens. As my post clearly states, Coppens raised a fair point that pointing to errors on Ancient Aliens: The Series is not the same as debunking the ancient astronaut theory. That is why I decided to examine Coppens specific claim.

In my review of Ancient Aliens Debunked I specifically cited my discomfort with his inclusion of religiously-motivated material in the movie. You can use my site's search engine to find the post. (Let me state again: I had nothing to do with that movie.) But his motivations do not change whether the facts are correct. Skepticism is an act, not an ideology, and even ancient astronaut believers can engage in skepticism, as even Coppens has done in debunking Zecharia Sitchin's nuttier ideas.

Finally, I'm not cherry-picking. My blog examines the claims of ancient astronaut and alternative writers one at a time because that's the approach I've taken, and it allows me to address specific claims as they arise. Others have made broader cases against these ideas in toto, but I do not do this for an important reason: I'm not claiming ancient aliens are impossible. I am specifically stating that each of the claims these pundits make is not supported by evidence. This is a crucial difference and one that Giorgio Tsoukalos and David Childress failed to grasp when they read (or chose not to read) my Cult of Alien Gods.

Reply
Tara Jordan
11/8/2012 01:03:46 am

Sincere apology,Indeed I completely forgot you actually mentioned your "discomfort with White`s inclusion of religiously-motivated material in the movie".

Nelspn
6/5/2016 08:23:31 am

Please read about the Dogon race from africa who claim to be descendants of ancient Egypt. they weird thing is that they claim an ugly fish race came from Sirius star cluster, These Dogon people also say that the star sirius had a companion star that affected the orbit of sirius A and was made of a material heavier then (i think it was iron). we now know the there is a second star Sirius B which is a neutron star. Acadamia claims that neutron stars are rediculously dense and that a teaspoon would weigh the same as a mountain if it were here on earth. This Space travelling people explained that there is still another star in that system (in which we have not yet found t\. That 3rd star is the home star that their planet orbits, it is a world muchly covered by water.; apearantly these beings taught sciences to us early humans. Believe whatever but please correct any discrepancies i may have missed

Reply
Tara Jordan
11/9/2012 09:42:11 am

Jason, I`m surprised the second generation of Ancient Aliens mongers are not using or recycling Robert Temple`s "Sirius Mystery" materials

Reply
Jason Colavito link
11/9/2012 09:46:49 am

They're too complex. They mention the Dogon from time to time, but Temple's more elaborate web of falsehoods drawn from a misunderstanding of academic materials is beyond their tolerance for complex detail.

Reply
Tara Jordan
11/9/2012 10:17:03 am

The original documentary about Marcel Griaule missions au pays Dogon.(if you haven't seen yet)
Tracking The Pale Fox 1931-1983:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bZXYB3U2FM

Reply
drew hempel link
11/10/2012 07:57:52 am

Good job Jason! I don't know why -- Philip Coppens did a great job researching the Stargate Conspiracy for Picknett and Prince -- "Stargate Conspiracy" is an awesome book. So my take on this "ancient aliens" surge is a desperate plea for money by two-bit writers and cable t.v. shows caring less about authenticity, etc. It makes for cheesy entertainment and people love buying into some "trendy" fantasy. Goes well with smoking dope, etc.

Anyway I discussed this with Philip Coppens when he posted over on realitysandwich -- pointing out how the 70,000 BCE oldest religious statue of a snake in a cave for the San Bushmen - it also features a hidden place for the shaman to project his voice as the snake god. Hmm. Just maybe that practice carried on as Africans moved around the world.

Of course this is not to dismiss the real paranormal powers of the San Bushmen -- their training is the original source for qigong Taoist Yoga alchemy training and also kundalini yoga ala Yogananda, etc.

Check out Andrew Zimmern's experience with a real San Bushmen shamanic healer! This experience is corroborated by real qigong masters. I know this stuff is rare but if you want to find real paranormal powers - then this is the place to look:

"Toward what I believed to be the end of the evening, Xaxe, a great hunter, healer, and shaman, laid hands on me....I felt the energy, his energy, surge through my body. He had his hands on me for about twenty-five or thirty seconds, but it felt like he had only touched me for a split second. Time stood still. I literally had a
short out of body experience. I could see him touching me from just above my body, almost like I was floating six feet off the ground, watching myself. All of a sudden I was back in my body observing an image of him thumbing through the book that contained all the pictures and moments in my life. I saw images of my childhood I hadn't remembered in years, pictures of my mother and me walking on a beach and shelling, very strong images. At the time, both during his touch and immediately afterward, I described it as him flipping through the pages of my life....Later the next morning, I spoke with Xaxe about the trance dance. He told
me he wanted access to me in a way that was not possible through a translator....Xaxe's curiosity was such a caring, loving gesture....When he detached from me it felt like someone was unplugging a lamp from a wall socket.
As he let go of me and continued to dance around the fire, I spontaneously burst into uncontrollable tears....I had been stripped to my emotional core, completely stunned by what I had witnessed so up close and personal."


151 Andrew Zimmern, The Bizarre Truth: how I walked out the door mouth first – and came back shaking my head (Random House, 2009), 234-5.

Reply
John Sevick
11/11/2012 07:26:21 am

It might be noted that what may appear to be horns in representations of Moses should be beams of light. In Exodus Chapter 34 Moses's face is transformed - it "glows". A similar form of the Hebrew "qaran" [glows] means "horns". This entered Christian tradition thru the Latin Vulgate translation of Scripture. Hence we have Michelangelo's Moses with horns. This is a paraphrase of a footnote in The New Interpreter's Study Bible. Horns on Moses is/are the result of defective translation.

Reply
Nelspn
6/5/2016 08:27:32 am

again with Moses and horns. the term used in the Torah describing Moses has two meanings \, one is horn, the other is lit up/luminescent but people will believe what they want. I propose he had luminescent horns! hahaha

Reply
Nibbie
8/10/2013 02:21:18 am

I have read your comments and I see people in the dark.
Therefore I will try and make some sense of it all.
First off let me say to criticize any ones study in ancient writings without knowledge you will be made a fool of.

I have studied ancient writings since before the internet.
These days there is so much info on the internet you could get lost in studies for the next 20 years.

let me start from the beginning, writings from an ancient scribe, he wrote this,.. Yes, the children of men shall progress onward and upward to the great goal. Children of Light shall they become. Flame of the flame shall their Souls ever be. Knowledge and wisdom shall be man's in the great age for he shall approach the eternal flame, the Source of all wisdom, the place of beginning, that is yet One with the end of all things. Yes, in a time that is yet unborn, all shall be One and One shall be All. Man, a perfect flame of this Cosmos, shall move forward to a place in the stars. Yes, shall move even from out of this space-time into another beyond the stars.

Learn this..."True of speech" means established in truth. One who is establish in truth is true of speech - pure of heart.

This is what one has to do to understand the ancient writings.

You must begin to open up to the true grandeur of creation, otherwise the mysteries of life will elude you, and you will be fit only to be a lowly follower of some dogmatic religious or Atheist faith that will offer many platitudes, the same old slogans, dogmatic statements and cliches, but will limit your growth in search for TRUTH.

Reply
Scott de Lautour
5/13/2016 06:10:28 am

Nibbie thankyou. I loved what you wrote.

Reply
Flying Tiger Comics link
7/14/2016 06:10:59 pm

This is all a bit like people "debunking Roswell" by establishing beyond any sane doubt that it had nothing to do with a crashed space alien vehicle but then turning around and advancing the equally absurd weather balloon premise.

Both premises are false, and in terms of ancient histories as surviving, compared to archaeological evidence - which is indeed subject to suppression and has been documented as being suppressed - Oannes is no more a space alien than a Hostess Twinkie, but to leap from that easy proof to blanket all diffusionism as wrong headed when Oannes himself is actually proof of it is just as silly as Ancient Aliens.

Narrow education has been the bane of modern civilisation. It truly has allowed the bureaucrat to defeat the polymath.

Reply
Tim Tempest link
4/4/2017 10:50:21 pm

Oannes wasnt in Babylonian times it was just in the same region..& Oannes is not the same as fallen angels from Enoch,the latter are space travelling flesh & blood people whereas the Oannes/7 sages/Purada fish/Apkallu/Annedoti were created creatures sent to help civilize early man..ala the Dogon story..more research required mr Colavito you lose

Reply
J.D.Thorn
3/5/2021 03:18:57 pm

Berossus deserves much better treatment than the dour impression you've given of him; particularly in regards to the serpent-fish god mythology replete in disparate cultures, e.g. Romulus and the river god Tiberius, this could have been an interesting motif to explore here.

There is surely middle ground, between the hyperbole and specious reasoning of more wild-eyed 'AAH' theorists and informed skeptics such as yourself? I'm not reaching for anything else, I'm asking why there's so much comparative serpent / fish parallels and their origins?

Likewise, Sagan's 'Dragon's of Eden' and Temple's Sirius Mystery (2nd ed. 1998), would have been good inclusions here too, you mention them in passing but, could have been used to greater effect e.g. how or what may have contributed to the a leap in human intelligence, other than agriculture from a mythological perspective?

i.e. the serpent and tree of knowledge motifs .

The poet-author Isaiah, made reference to the Leviathan too, this would be a good entry point, given he wrote that he wrote it some ~200years before Berossus.

" In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." — Isaiah 27:1 (KJV)

The question is, why, where does the motif comes from?




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