CIVILIZATION: The Real Story

In 1872 a self-taught engraver named George Smith sat in a back room of the British Museum and read, on a broken clay tablet, a flood story older than Genesis. Behind the flood was the making of man. Behind the making of man was a strike. And behind the strike were the gods the Sumerians called the Anunnaki, who did the hard work of the world until they could not stand it anymore.

CIVILIZATION: The Real Story tells what the tablets tell, as a story. Enki wades ashore at the head of the Persian Gulf with fifty volunteers and builds Eridu, the first city. The Igigi burn their tools and march on Enlil’s house. Ninmah, the birth goddess, mixes the essence of a slain god into clay and holds up the first child. Lulu grows up in Ninmah’s house and raises a son named Adapa, who is offered the bread of life. A sage in a fish-skin hood walks up out of the sea to teach. Inanna comes to Eridu to steal the hundred decrees that make a city. Up in the high places, the Watchers look down at the daughters of men and cannot look away. And a king’s son named Atrahasis, who has buried eleven people in nine days, presses his ear to a reed wall and hears a god tell him to build a boat.

After every chapter comes The Record: the actual tablets and translations, the digs at Eridu and Nippur, the Sumerian King List, the Book of Enoch, the fusion seam on human chromosome 2, the directed-panspermia paper Francis Crick put his name to, the books of Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Däniken, and the scholars who answer them. You always know which part is story, which part is evidence, and where the author’s own belief begins.

It ends in a genetics lab in Durham, North Carolina, nineteen days after a funeral, where Ruth Callahan pulls up her own second chromosome and finds the knot in the thread.

CIVILIZATION: The Real Story is a documentary novel of the Anunnaki and the making of mankind, from the first landing in the marsh to the morning the makers went home.