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22 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE<br />
rounded forms that they could not have been made by nature.<br />
Also, old pottery shards were found on many of these hills<br />
indicating<br />
that these sites were ancient human habitations.<br />
One day in 1840 Botta gave in to his urge to dig up one of the<br />
round mounds to see what was inside. He started excavating the<br />
Kuyunjik hill on the Tigris River, just outside of Mosul. Besides<br />
the usual broken pottery he found a great number of clay tablets<br />
in different sizes, but mostly measuring imiformly 17 by 22 centimeters<br />
or, as was discovered later,<br />
12 by 16 Sumerian fingers of<br />
14 millimeters each. These tablets were covered with cuneiform<br />
characters, produced with an angled stylus. At that time there<br />
was much talk about and interest in this form of writing, but<br />
nobody had deciphered it yet.<br />
Cuneiform inscriptions had been discovered for the first time<br />
during the fifteenth century in the ruins of Persepolis, in Persia,<br />
the ancient capital of King Darius I.<br />
In 1472 the ambassador of<br />
Venice at the Persian court, Giosophat Barbaro, described these<br />
tablets, as did in 1602 Antonio de Gouveia, the ambassador of<br />
Portugal, at the same court and the explorer Pietro della Valle,<br />
who brought the first samples of cuneiform tablets back to<br />
Europe.<br />
Luckily no one at that time could understand these writings,<br />
because if the Pope would have read their message and discovered<br />
that it was the earth that turned aroimd the sun, or that the<br />
biblical version of the Flood was nothing but a pale reflection of<br />
the saga of Gilgamesh, or that a great part of Genesis was inspired<br />
by Sumerian legends, it is not difficult to imagine what<br />
would have happened to the old clay tablets and the people who<br />
found or read them.<br />
Consul Botta tired fast from his efforts<br />
to collect broken pottery<br />
and clay tablets and started to lose interest when he met in<br />
Mosul in 1842 a young Englishman by the name of Henry<br />
Layard. They became good friends, smoking opium and hashish<br />
together, but luckily Layard had to give up on drug smoking because<br />
it made him very sick.<br />
Botta told him about his excavations and Layard became very<br />
interested. Together they climbed the Kuyunjik hill and Layard<br />
was convinced right away that this was a very interesting archaeological<br />
site worthy of serious exploration. But Layard had