Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27958 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 464 pages

Customer Reviews

Very Interesting
This was a very enjoyable and interesting read. The author has obviously done his research, and poses some plausible theories backed up with historical and scientific documentation but refrains from forcing his point of view upon the reader. I found the book fascinating and look forward to reading more of the Earth Chronicles.

It explains such a lot!
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.

Fantasy shrouded in pseudo-science
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!