Luna Marine(55)

In 1799, a French soldier with Napoléon’s army working on the fortifications of Rashid, Egypt—a place Europeans called Rosetta—turned up a flat, polished stone inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics, with a kind of cursive hieroglyphic script called demotic, and Greek. The Rosetta stone was the key that allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher the language of a civilization in some ways as alien to eighteenth-century Europe as the Builders were to humankind.

What he’d found at Picard was a Rosetta stone indeed…or, rather, seventeen Rosetta stones that together were slowly but conclusively hammering home a definite link between the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, and another race of extraterrestrials that—if the Proto-Sumerian translations were accurate—called itself the An.

“If our translations are accurate,” David went on after a moment, “then we have a race, a civilization that called itself An, building colonies on Earth something like six thousand…maybe as far back as thirteen thousand years ago. The artistic style definitely ties them in with ancient Sumer.”

“What the natives called Shumer,” Teri said. “‘The Land of the Guardians.’ The name of their chief god was An or Anu. And the pantheon of Sumerian gods was called the Anunnaki….”

“‘Those who came to Earth from the place of An,’” David added, translating. He’d been working on Proto-Sumerian translations now for days, and it was becoming second nature.

“You know,” she said, “this has always been one of the biggest mysteries of archeology, as big a question mark as the Sphinx or the pyramids. The Sumerian language is unrelated to any other we know. The people…we have no idea where they came from. They were not Semitic, like the Akkadians or the others who built on their culture later. And when they settled in Mesopotamia, well…it was almost literally as though civilization sprang into being overnight. They claimed the gods had given them writing, medicine, architecture. The gods domesticated animals and created new kinds of grain and other crops.”

“Small wonder some of the astronuts have been claiming the Sumerians themselves were extraterrestrial.”

She snorted. “That idea’s ludicrous, of course. They were human, which means they shared their DNA with the life evolved here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the one bit of silliness that gets me most about some of the ancient-astronut crowd. Adam and Eve were not shipwrecked visitors from another planet! Not when chimpanzees share something over ninety-eight percent of our DNA!”

“I do wonder, sometimes, if the Sumerians might have come from the human colony on Mars, the one the Builders put there. The bodies you found there?”

He grunted. “Hard to see how that would fit. The Builders were on Mars half a million years ago. That’s a long time, between whoever built the Face and the rise of Sumeria. No, there’s more to this. A lot more.” He shook his head. “Anyway, what we found on the Moon is going to upset everybody. The ancient-astronaut cults, established religions, the archeological community. The government. Historians. It’s hard to think of someone I’m not going to piss off when I release this stuff.”

“I still think you’re being too sensitive. I can understand the problem with the conservative archeologists. But the cults? And the churches?”

“Remember all of those places in the Bible, in Genesis, where God says things like, ‘Let us make Man in our image?…’ Holdovers from the Sumerian texts that those passages were based on. Hell, ever since George Smith translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, back in 1872, we’ve known that a lot of Genesis came to us from Sumerian myths and writings. The Garden of Eden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, all of that.” He chuckled, but the sound was grim. “Don’t you think the Vatican is going to be a bit upset if we produce proof that the Yahweh of the Old Testament was an Anunnaki, straight out of Sumerian myths?

“As for the ancient-astronaut churches, they all see the ET ‘gods’ as saviors. Protectors. Angels and divine guides. Nice people who might turn up again someday to help Mankind out of its current mess.”

She made a sour face. “It would help if the An were the savior type.”

He reached out and lightly stroked the faxcast, with its row of five humans, bound and leashed. “Kind of puts the whole idea of worshiping God in a new light, doesn’t it?”

What he’d translated so far seemed to match certain aspects of the Sumerian myths; humans had been slaves under the An, working in their mines and agricultural colonies and even as janissary armies, conquering “uncivilized” neighbors under the direction of their godlike masters. Most of the translations he’d worked out so far, with Howard’s help, spoke of primitive tribes rounded up and “civilized” by troops under the command of Sharu-Gaz, a term literally meaning “Supreme Leaders of the Killers,” but which both David and Howard had translated as “war-Leaders.” They listed cattle, sheep, and crops taken, gathered, and counted; tributes offered; enemies killed; villages burned; precious metals—the Sumerian word was zu-ab—gathered for transport to “Heaven”; and vast numbers of slaves captured, penned, and sold. The An, whoever they’d been, appeared to share human bio-chemistry, with left-handed amino acids and a preference for right-handed sugars. They’d been able to eat crops and animals native to Earth, and they’d forced the natives to raise those crops and herds. For them.