Customer Reviews
Very Interesting - By: Dawn, 30 Apr 2008 
This was a very enjoyable & interesting read. The author has obviously done his research, & poses some plausible theories backed up with historical & scientific documentation but refrains from forcing his point of view upon the reader. I found the book fascinating & look forward to reading more of the Earth Chronicles.
It explains such a lot! - By: A. Platt, 28 Feb 2007 I've just finished reading the firstin the Earth Chronicles series, & - 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 & shape it. Then, approximately 23,000 years ago, we learned how to make tools out of all kinds of material, build stupendous temples & temple-like structures & learned farming ad animal husbandry & we now keep sending up satelittles into space - & why are we so vastly different to our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees, when according to all evolutionary theories, we should still be knuckle walking & livingin the African savannahs, even if we have lost most of our body hair.
Something doesn't smell rightin the halls of science & 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 & hide all the evidencein it.
Good read.
Fantasy shrouded in pseudo-science - By: , 09 Jun 2004 
With this book Sitchin has far outdone himself through fantasy, rhetoric & imagination. His claim is that there is a twelth bodyin our solar system (counting moon & 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 revealedin 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 & out false. The early decipherers of cuneiform were G. Grotefend, H. Rawlinson, E. Hincks, W. Talbot & J. Oppert & they were able to decipher the script based on the text copied by Rawlinson at Behistun. The decipherment was deemed completein 1857 when independent translations of an unpublished text from the time of Tiglath-Pileser were compared.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 writtenin the cuneiform script, the earliest texts (ca. 3000 BCE) are written mostlyin 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 trainingin Sumerology or Assyriology - he is an autodidact. His translations & use of archaeology are faulty & confused. Any bit of probing of the relavent scholarly literature will provide light on the actual meaning & content of these texts. There is no conspiracyin 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 namesin the paper & they would actually sell books. Actual archaeology & textual translation are somewhat more mundane, but still fascinating. Don't be fooled! Sitchin couches his folliesin academic jargon, but his books should be read as fiction!
A provocative new theory of man's history - By: Daniel Jolley, 30 Nov 2002 
This is the first bookin 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 herein order to lay the foundation for what is to come. In other words, most of the really interesting stuff comes laterin the series--Ancient Egypt, MesoAmerica, etc. Parts of this first book are somewhat dry & hard to get through. As one gets into the latter half, though, some pretty amazing arguments are made. If you read this book & 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 & should at least lend an idea of possiblity to objective readers.
The idea that "ancient astronauts" (a term I dislike) had a handin Man's creation & evolution is not new. Sitchin goes far beyond the normal arguments, however. He argues that there is an undiscovered planetin our own solar system upon which life developed & 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 & essentially crashed into a large planet between Mars & Jupiter--the planetin question was broken up into two parts, one eventually forming Earth & the other the asteroid belt. The 12th planet (counting the sun & 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 & 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 werein fact genetic cousins. Thus, the Nefilim became early man's gods, & their stories were toldin the artifacts of the ancient Sumerians & of the kingdoms that came after them.
Sitchin makes a determined effort to tie Christianity & the Bible to the tale he unfolds. He effectively, & with good evidence, shows that the early storiesin the Bible are based largely on older manuscripts from Sumeria. He explains many of the mysterious passagesin the Bible by tying the stories to more complete Sumerian tales--the Elohim, the plural Deity mentionedin the Creation story, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, & 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 & should not be convinced based on this one book. Much supporting evidence is to be foundin the later booksin 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 & 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 & miraculously 300,000 years ago. Right or wrong, his ideas answer a lot of questions & deserve serious study. Sitchin's knowledge of ancient civilizations is immense, & his judgments cannot be dismissed without serious attention paid to them.
So what happened to Nibiru in historic times? - By: Pieter, 03 Jan 2001 Sitchin's books are always a pleasure to read with the author's engaging style & bold assertions, but the most obvious holein his theory is that there is NO evidence of any cataclysm or upheavalin 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 & that it caused the great upheavals & the end of the last ice agein about 10 000 BC. Also, he makes unscientific statements about linguistic affinity & does not work like a scientist here. It is easy enough to find similarities between a languagein Eurasia & onein the Americas, but one must put thisin context,in a broader taxonomy (classification structure). There are similarities between Sumerian & Nostratic (Eurasiatic) the parent family of Indo-European & many others, & also (other)similarities between Sumerian & Dene-Caucasic. For these, I recommend the work of professional linguists like Alan Bomhard, Joseph Greenberg & Merritt Ruhlen. Sitchin takes many liberties but at least he does itin an entertaining way.
