THE GRAVE OF SARGON THE GREAT AND THE BURIED CITY OF AKKAD IN IGBO LAND
The Sumerian civilization is the oldest civilization in the world. The mythology of the Sumerians recorded in cuneiform texts, have been translated, revealing that all the earliest mythologies of the world, including Biblical Genesis, were mythologies of the Sumerians. From the Sumerian Genesis period onto the end of its civilization, its sacred and political texts speak of Eden as the homeland of the Sumerians and of the Sumerian civilization. All Sumer’s kings even onto Babylonian, Mesopotamian and Assyrian times, spoke of themselves as Kings of Edin (Eden).
For 23 years, we have been on the trail of the ancient Sumerian civilization, studying its cuneiform records in translation. The cuneiform texts speak of the latter-day developments in the Middle Eastern Sumerian colonies of Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon. But they also speak of a mother-land called Shumer/Sumer, which according to Assyriologists, has never been found. Equally lost is the city of Akkad, homeland of the Akkadians, which was ruled first by Sargon the Great.
Pre-Cuneiform Sumerian Inscriptions Reveal Links with Africa
To get a bearing on the study of this lost Sumerian Mother civilization, we switched to the study of Pre-Cuneiform Sumerian inscriptions, for as we found out, long before the invention of the cuneiform method of writing in the Middle East, Sumerians first wrote on stone and rock, pottery, copper, bronze and iron implements. These were all original Sumerian inventions. Sumerian Kings and Emperors also wrote their official kings-seals on hard wood like ebony. Some of these have been found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon Mohenjo Daro and Harappan. Our study of the official seals of the kings of Sumer revealed that Sumer was a great world empire and its kings and emperors were Masters of the Seas and oceans. L.A. Waddell in Makers of Civilization in Race and History (London, 1921) noted that after Sumer was destroyed (2,023 B.C.)its civilization continued to thrive in its empires: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Harappan, Mohenjo Daro. Zecharia Sitchen who spent his entire life translating and studying Sumerian cuneiform texts, observed that Sumer taught the world everything they know, and that it was refugees fleeing the destroyed cities of Sumer that seeded the first civilizations in China, India, Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, and that Egypt was a direct offshoot of Sumer.
From our study of the official seals of the various kings of Sumer, we could immediately see a direct connect with the Sub-Saharan African continent in terms of common symbols. We also discovered that the earliest Sumerian writing form was written on stone. Since 2002, we have been studying ancient stone inscriptions in Cross Rive State, Nigeria popularly called Ikom monoliths. We have been connecting with international scholars who are involved in the same kind of research. In the process, it was discovered that one particular kind of stone inscription found all over the world, which is called Ogam in Britain, which had never before been translated into any form of sensible sentence, easily lent itself into translation in the Igbo language of South-Eastern Nigeria, and we were the first to score this feat! We later found out that Ogam was one of the many forms of Stone Inscriptions created by the ancient Sumerians of West Africa. We have discovered that most of the native lines and symbols that grace ancient African artifacts are forms of Sumerian inscriptions, whose meanings have been lost until now, of which the commonest is Ogam. Using Ogam we have transcribed some famous ancient NOK artifacts of Middle Belt Nigeria and found that every one of the ubiquitous slanting eyes on Nok read the word MA-GAN!(See plate 11). Magan was an ancient Sumerian nation conquered by Menes - the founder of First Dynasty Egypt. This means that Magan was once a name for ancient Nigeria, of which NOK was a major city.
To date, the whereabouts of the ancient homeland of the fleeing Sumerians has remained a mystery. Archaeological efforts to find it in Mesopotamia have struck zero. However, our transcriptions of ancient African artifacts such as the 350 inscribed stone monoliths of Cross River State, Nigeria, the ancient NOK terracotta inscriptions of Plateau state, Nigeria, and especially the pottery, bronze and copper inscriptions on the artifacts excavated in 1950 by British archaeologists Thurstan Shaw in Igbo Ukwu, Anambra State, have revealed them to be Sumerian! Some of these ancient symbols are emblems of Sumerian cities recorded in Egyptian mythological texts such as the Pyramid Texts, The Coffin Texts and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Others are emblems of Sumerian and Egyptian gods such as Shamash (Utu), Sin, Sheshat, Adad, Thoth, Osiris, Horus and many others, all of whose activities are well recorded in Yoruba, Benin and Igbo local pantheons of Gods in their native Nigerian as well as Sumerian names. A recently published linguistic research on the language that the Sumerians spoke, concluded that they spoke a Niger-Congo language. Niger-Congo is the language spoken in Southern Nigeria and Cameroon.
Sumerians and Nigerian Shared Many Cultural Traits
There is documented evidence that ancient Sumerians shared cultural, traditional and occupational traits with rural Nigerians. People of both nations were farmers, merchants, metallurgists. Both were adept in bronze alloy making. They lived in mud houses of reed, worshipped tutelary gods in small shrines, drank palm wine, wore wrappers and loin cloths, ground grains on stone querns and used hoes in farming. Their kings used the same instruments of power used by Nigerian kings to this very day. In a portrait of king Sargon’s grandson, King Narmer (Enzu) located in the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Turkey, he is wearing a wrapper, Nigeria-style with one shoulder bare “and carries a club in the right hand and a whip in the left and wears bracelets on both arms and a tall Phrygian hat.” The Phrygian hat (Santa Claus hat) is the traditional Hat of Igbo initiates and Chiefs of Eri. Among Sumerian emblems and inscriptions, it is called Eri. Narmer’s “club” is the Igbo traditional wooden club-like emblem of divine authority called Ofo. The whip is the traditional Igbo/Black African horse-tail found in all Black Africa, borne by elders. Like Igbo people, Sumerian people of high rank were buried in their private houses which they had inhabited while they lived. Their priests were called Shangu, a name derived from the Yoruba god of thunder Shango, whose equivalent in Sumer was Utu. Like native Yoruba, Benin and Igbo priests Sumerian priests wore white wrapper while performing rituals in their shrines. The list of similarities is endless…
Emblems of Sargon the Great and His Lost City of Akkad Found in Anambra State, Nigeria
Sargon the Great was Sumer’s first official post-Deluge king (ca. 3500 B.C.). His city of Akkad, the oldest Post Deluge city of Sumer, has never been found, nor excavated, by archaeologists. However, based on our recent discoveries from the study of pre-cuneiform texts attributed to Sargon and his line of kings, we believe we have found Sargon’s lost city – a buried city in Igbo land excavated in 1950 by a young British archaeologist fresh from the university. We found among the images of the excavated bronze and copper artifacts of Igbo Ukwu, the two official seals of the most famous of Sumer’s emperors - Sargon the Great of Akkad - among the excavated artifacts of Igbo Ukwu, which are mostly lodged in the British Museum. Not only Sargon’s official seals but also those of all his sons who ruled after him were preserved in Igbo Ukwu! Sargon was also identified with Biblical Nimrud. Both Sargon’s and Nimrud’s known Sumerian emblems are found in Igbo Ukwu (plates 1a-k). One of the artifacts (famously called an altar-stand) portrays a man and a woman standing back to back. The man bears the Seal of Sargon on his forehead and the Sumerian pictograph for ‘Bara’, from which is derived Egyptian word ‘Pharaoh’ and Hindu word ‘Bharat’. His two hands form the word A-KAD in mirror-image (plate 1a, b)! Sargon is understood to be the same as Biblical Nimrud, both in his name and symbols. The artifact also features Serpent Writing which is an ancient writing form known to Hindus and Phoenicians alike.
Our discoveries suggest strongly that the present neighboring towns of Igbo Ukwu and Oraeri are standing on the ruin of the lost city of Akkad – the city of the Chaldean Magi located in the land the Sumerians called ‘Land of BU’: the colonialists called it EBO and the natives call it IGBO. L.A. Waddell in Makers of Civilization, insists that the name Sargon/Shargon when properly read in Sumerian means SHA-ERI-GAN – ‘EMPEROR ERI OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN’! Local legends say that Ora-Eri - ‘Eri Folk’ were the original inhabitants of the land where the excavations were found, having been driven out in war by the present inhabitants. Eri is the putative ancestor of the Kwa/Qa tribes of Nigeria and Ghana. True to type, many Sumerians god-kings proudly bore the Nigerian title Qa/Kwa.
Akkad is the Ancient City of Ayodhya of Indian Ramayana Epic
Akkad, otherwise called Agade in Sumerian texts, was known by the name Ayodhya in Indian epic tale Ramayana. L.A. Waddell in his comparative translations of Pre-cuneiform Sumerian texts with Indus Valley Purana epics and Aryan epic texts (the Eddas) observed that the king-lists of Sumer were exactly the same with those of the Lower Indus, the Aryans of Europe and of Pre-dynastic Egypt. The Sumerian name of Sargon is SHAR KIN. SARKIN is the Nigerian word for ‘KING’ in one of the many ethnic languages of Nigeria! Many Sumerian names of kings have survived in Nigeria. One king of Sargon’s line was called Gani Eri. Another was called Attah, to name a few. These are existing names of Nigerian royal houses. Sumerians introduced saddled horses to the world. A saddled horse with a rider was found in the grave of the Monarch buried in Igbo Ukwu. Many other sacred emblems of Sumer too numerous to mention here, were among the excavations. These will be listed in our new forthcoming book on the subject titled Eden in Sumer on the Niger. In fact Thurstan Shaw noted repeatedly that many of the artifacts look Indian in style. One such seal is the elephant-head seal of Narmer, the grandson of Sargon the Great (plate 2a, b). It also bears the quadrangle emblem of Sargon.
Akkad is the Ancient City of Ayodhya of Indian Ramayana Epic
All Sumerian emperors bore the title “King of Eden (Edin) Land”. Their symbols for Eden are: A Crescent Moon hugging a Sun disc (plate 3), and an X with two opposite ends joined (plate 4a). This latter symbol is the commonest earth-goddess symbol in Igbo land (plate 4b). According to Sumerian texts, these two symbols also have the meaning of “rising and setting sun”. Sargon’s father claims to have conquered the “land of the Rising and the Setting Sun and his great grand-son king Gani-Eri was recorded to have ruled a Sun Temple. Archaeologists of the University of Nigeria have been conducting research in Pre-Historic iron smelting sites in Enugu State since two decades. Smelting materials from one of the sites, recently returned a date of 2,000 B.C., which is so far, the oldest date for iron smelting in the world and coincides with the demise of the Sumerian civilization. This particular iron smelting site houses a Pre-historic monument of a ‘Temple of the Sun’ created with hundreds of huge iron slag piled into the shape of a crescent Moon hugging a Sun-disc (plate 3b, compare with 3a above)! The native priests who worship at the ancient shrine claim that the disc (mound) in the center of the crescent moon symbol is covering a hole leading into a bottomless pit! The Egyptian Book of the Dead records that the Duat where the Pharaohs go for the Afterlife is an underground construction located in Heliopolis (‘City of the Sun’) in Eden, and that it has an opening into the earth called An/Anu (Biblical On), meaning “Hole”. The Igbo word for ‘Hole’ is Onu. We have demonstrated in a recent write-up published in the “Migration and Diffusion” website by Christine Pellech that all landmarks associated with the Duat of Heliopolis in Egyptian texts are found in and around this prehistoric shrine of the metal people of Enugu State. And our conclusion based on hardcore evidence, is that the Enugu ‘Temple of the Sun’ located in Lejja, Nsukka is the Egyptian Sun Temple of the lost Eden city of Heliopolis. It actually has an opening into a bottomless pit (plate 3b).
Sumerian Step Pyramids (Ziggurats) in Enugu State
Sumerians taught the world to build pyramids. Their step-pyramids were called ziggurats. Ancient Igbos built Ziggurats and buried their heroic god-men in them. The last Ziggurats of Enugu State were destroyed by the British colonialists and missionaries in the nineteen forties. An image of the last ancient Sumerian ziggurat of ancient Igbo land photographed by British anthropologist .G. I. Jones in 1932 in Udi county, Enugu state, can be seen below (plate 5).
This is the tip of the iceberg. We have authored three major publications since we began this research in 1990 – The Gram Code of African Adam, They Lived Before Adam and The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam. One of our books on the subject – They Lived Before Adam – won the International Book Awards in 2009, and featured on C-Span Book TV, New York and on Harlem Book Fair with an award (in the latter)and a special recognition (see U-Tube Videos).
Eden of the Sumerians
All Sumerian kings and emperors bore the proud title “King …Emperor of Eden (Edin) Land”. Their oldest creation stories are the same creation stories in Biblical Genesis, except that Sumerians preserved all the practical, astronomical and scientific details that are lacking in Genesis, as well as the names and identities of the Gods of Eden: the coming of the Biblical Nephilim, the genetic manipulation (creation) of Homo Erectus to bring about Homo Sapiens (Adam). In the past two decades, Science has proved the Sumerians right in every detail through Genetics, Linguistics , Paleontology and Archaeology. The Human Genome Project has proved that Adam was an offshoot of a Pre-Adam human ancestor dwelling in the Nigeria-Cameroon area of West Africa (see Plate 10). Before 300,000 B.C This corroborates our thesis illustrated in They Lived Before Adam (2009) where we demonstrated with paleontological and archaeological evidence that 7 million years old Toumai man of Chad – ancestor of Homo Erectus - known scientifically as Sahelanthropus Tchadensis – a relative of the Ape man - who was discovered in 2002 by French Professor Michel Brunet, was the direct ancestor Ugwuele man who lived in Igbo land before 500,000 B.C. all the way to the Late Stone Age (see plate 9b). The Toumai man of Chad and the Ugwuele man of Nigeria - both border nations - make a final case for a West, rather an East African origin of Mankind. A Nigerian location of Eden implies a Nigerian location of Sumer, and vice versa.
As if these are not shocking enough, we find that a sizable number of ancient inscribed Stone monoliths discovered in 1970 in the virgin forests, villages and under the ground in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (in Cross River and Akwa Ibom States) bear the faces of apes (plate 6)! The Egyptian Book of the Dead claims that Ape-men called Khemennu were the Primeval Ancestors of Humanity as well as the Scribes of the Duat in Heliopolis, and that their symbolic number was eight. The eight-pointed star is the symbol of their Khemennu city or Khammasi city (in Sumerian). Nigerian monoliths actually bear the eight-pointed star of the Khammasi/Khemennu gods of Sumer and Egypt. The Khemennu scribes of Ikom – who needless to say - are the same Khemmenu Primeval Ancestors of Sumer and Egypt actually share this symbol with Nze na Ozo god-men and Initiates of Igbo land (see plate 8)! What this suggests is that the Ape men authors of the monoliths were intelligent beings. Perhaps humanity may need to search into the actual family of apes for its real ancestors! This opinion, though seemingly outlandish, is borne out of the fact that several cases of recorded oral traditions of internal migrations of various Nigerian peoples into the Lower Niger Delta, claim that migrants encountered intelligent ape-men aboriginal residents with tails, who traded with, or resisted the advance of the migrants. As unscientific as this may sound, the tails indicate that Homo Erectus was more ape than man! Yet he was intelligent enough to write on rock, as recorded in the Nigerian monoliths and in the famous Hindu Ramayan epic, where the ape Hanuman is depicted as an intelligent ape-man who could write verses on stone – a Sumerian/Nigerian story never-the-less! Hanuman was probably the Egyptian god Thoth, the leader of the Primeval Ancestors of The Book of the Dead - the Khemennu ape-men of Sumer in Eden.
We Call on the British Museum Authorities
For over three years, we have been studying the pottery and bronze inscriptions on the hundreds of artifacts and potsherds excavated by Thurstan Shaw at Igbo Ukwu and have demonstrated that they are mostly letters found in orthographies of almost every ancient Middle Eastern civilization. The direction of borrowing is more than obvious. The result of this study is carefully catalogued in our latest publication in the series – The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam – Unearthing Heliopolis – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India (2010). Armed with these findings, the Catherine Acholonu Research Center, Abuja, Nigeria, hereby calls on the British Museum authorities to release for autopsy and proper dating, the remains of the monarch whose partially decayed bones were excavated in Igbo Ukwu in 1950 by Thurstan Shaw.
The monarch’s bones were partially preserved through contact with rows of copper wires adorning his arms and legs. He wore a copper crown engraved with the official emblem of Sargon the Great, a forehead Sun-disc, a breastplate of copper and a regalia strung with one hundred and eleven thousand coloured carnelian beads! Other emblems of Sargon the Great and his royal line taken from Igbo Ukwu were: a Roped Bronze Vase. The roped design consists of quadrangles – the official emblem of Sargon the Great; an Alter Stand with the image of a man and a woman standing back to back. The man bears two other Sargon emblems on his forehead and on his belly-button, one of which is a double concentric circle.
The cache of goods excavated in Igbo Ukwu would fill two museums. A few of the artifacts are located in Nigerian museums, but the bulk of them are hidden away in the British Museum and Nigerians are not allowed to access them. The civilization in question, like all other Sumerian civilizations in Nigeria, is outside living memory of the natives of Igbo land, and only exists in long forgotten folklore. The excavated city of Akkad was found four to five meters deep beneath the foundations of buildings of the present town of Igbo Ukwu. Natives still dig up grooved pottery and bronze-wares while digging cisterns in every part of the town, as well as in the neighboring town of Oraeri up to this very day. This indicates a thriving civilization in its time. The Igbo Ukwu bronze casting method differs from other Nigerian Bronzes in the use of Tin – technique employed by the Sumerian Chaldeans; and in the use of the lost wax method. Igbo Ukwu bronze is also in a class of its own in the delicacy and exquisitely ornate nature of its designs. We have identified the locations of other lost cities of Pre-Historic and Pre-Deluge Sumer in various parts of Nigeria, as well as various landmarks that feature in Sumerian literature and mythology. Sumerians sought to duplicate landmarks from their original homeland in their new places of abode. Accordingly, the Niger-Benue confluence rivers of their Olden Texts gave way to the Tigris and Euphrates confluence rivers in their new cities in Babylon and Mesopotamia.
We Invite the International Media
These discoveries call for the redefinition of the parameters of Knowledge, a remapping of the course of human civilization and, I daresay, a re-writing of our History books. Accordingly, the Researchers of the Catherine Acholonu Research Center are inviting the international media to a series of world Press Conferences in Abuja, New York, London, Dubai, New Delhi and Beijing to enable us demonstrate our findings to the world. Dates will be communicated in due course.
For 23 years, we have been on the trail of the ancient Sumerian civilization, studying its cuneiform records in translation. The cuneiform texts speak of the latter-day developments in the Middle Eastern Sumerian colonies of Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon. But they also speak of a mother-land called Shumer/Sumer, which according to Assyriologists, has never been found. Equally lost is the city of Akkad, homeland of the Akkadians, which was ruled first by Sargon the Great.
Pre-Cuneiform Sumerian Inscriptions Reveal Links with Africa
To get a bearing on the study of this lost Sumerian Mother civilization, we switched to the study of Pre-Cuneiform Sumerian inscriptions, for as we found out, long before the invention of the cuneiform method of writing in the Middle East, Sumerians first wrote on stone and rock, pottery, copper, bronze and iron implements. These were all original Sumerian inventions. Sumerian Kings and Emperors also wrote their official kings-seals on hard wood like ebony. Some of these have been found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Babylon Mohenjo Daro and Harappan. Our study of the official seals of the kings of Sumer revealed that Sumer was a great world empire and its kings and emperors were Masters of the Seas and oceans. L.A. Waddell in Makers of Civilization in Race and History (London, 1921) noted that after Sumer was destroyed (2,023 B.C.)its civilization continued to thrive in its empires: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Harappan, Mohenjo Daro. Zecharia Sitchen who spent his entire life translating and studying Sumerian cuneiform texts, observed that Sumer taught the world everything they know, and that it was refugees fleeing the destroyed cities of Sumer that seeded the first civilizations in China, India, Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, and that Egypt was a direct offshoot of Sumer.
From our study of the official seals of the various kings of Sumer, we could immediately see a direct connect with the Sub-Saharan African continent in terms of common symbols. We also discovered that the earliest Sumerian writing form was written on stone. Since 2002, we have been studying ancient stone inscriptions in Cross Rive State, Nigeria popularly called Ikom monoliths. We have been connecting with international scholars who are involved in the same kind of research. In the process, it was discovered that one particular kind of stone inscription found all over the world, which is called Ogam in Britain, which had never before been translated into any form of sensible sentence, easily lent itself into translation in the Igbo language of South-Eastern Nigeria, and we were the first to score this feat! We later found out that Ogam was one of the many forms of Stone Inscriptions created by the ancient Sumerians of West Africa. We have discovered that most of the native lines and symbols that grace ancient African artifacts are forms of Sumerian inscriptions, whose meanings have been lost until now, of which the commonest is Ogam. Using Ogam we have transcribed some famous ancient NOK artifacts of Middle Belt Nigeria and found that every one of the ubiquitous slanting eyes on Nok read the word MA-GAN!(See plate 11). Magan was an ancient Sumerian nation conquered by Menes - the founder of First Dynasty Egypt. This means that Magan was once a name for ancient Nigeria, of which NOK was a major city.
To date, the whereabouts of the ancient homeland of the fleeing Sumerians has remained a mystery. Archaeological efforts to find it in Mesopotamia have struck zero. However, our transcriptions of ancient African artifacts such as the 350 inscribed stone monoliths of Cross River State, Nigeria, the ancient NOK terracotta inscriptions of Plateau state, Nigeria, and especially the pottery, bronze and copper inscriptions on the artifacts excavated in 1950 by British archaeologists Thurstan Shaw in Igbo Ukwu, Anambra State, have revealed them to be Sumerian! Some of these ancient symbols are emblems of Sumerian cities recorded in Egyptian mythological texts such as the Pyramid Texts, The Coffin Texts and The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Others are emblems of Sumerian and Egyptian gods such as Shamash (Utu), Sin, Sheshat, Adad, Thoth, Osiris, Horus and many others, all of whose activities are well recorded in Yoruba, Benin and Igbo local pantheons of Gods in their native Nigerian as well as Sumerian names. A recently published linguistic research on the language that the Sumerians spoke, concluded that they spoke a Niger-Congo language. Niger-Congo is the language spoken in Southern Nigeria and Cameroon.
Sumerians and Nigerian Shared Many Cultural Traits
There is documented evidence that ancient Sumerians shared cultural, traditional and occupational traits with rural Nigerians. People of both nations were farmers, merchants, metallurgists. Both were adept in bronze alloy making. They lived in mud houses of reed, worshipped tutelary gods in small shrines, drank palm wine, wore wrappers and loin cloths, ground grains on stone querns and used hoes in farming. Their kings used the same instruments of power used by Nigerian kings to this very day. In a portrait of king Sargon’s grandson, King Narmer (Enzu) located in the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Turkey, he is wearing a wrapper, Nigeria-style with one shoulder bare “and carries a club in the right hand and a whip in the left and wears bracelets on both arms and a tall Phrygian hat.” The Phrygian hat (Santa Claus hat) is the traditional Hat of Igbo initiates and Chiefs of Eri. Among Sumerian emblems and inscriptions, it is called Eri. Narmer’s “club” is the Igbo traditional wooden club-like emblem of divine authority called Ofo. The whip is the traditional Igbo/Black African horse-tail found in all Black Africa, borne by elders. Like Igbo people, Sumerian people of high rank were buried in their private houses which they had inhabited while they lived. Their priests were called Shangu, a name derived from the Yoruba god of thunder Shango, whose equivalent in Sumer was Utu. Like native Yoruba, Benin and Igbo priests Sumerian priests wore white wrapper while performing rituals in their shrines. The list of similarities is endless…
Emblems of Sargon the Great and His Lost City of Akkad Found in Anambra State, Nigeria
Sargon the Great was Sumer’s first official post-Deluge king (ca. 3500 B.C.). His city of Akkad, the oldest Post Deluge city of Sumer, has never been found, nor excavated, by archaeologists. However, based on our recent discoveries from the study of pre-cuneiform texts attributed to Sargon and his line of kings, we believe we have found Sargon’s lost city – a buried city in Igbo land excavated in 1950 by a young British archaeologist fresh from the university. We found among the images of the excavated bronze and copper artifacts of Igbo Ukwu, the two official seals of the most famous of Sumer’s emperors - Sargon the Great of Akkad - among the excavated artifacts of Igbo Ukwu, which are mostly lodged in the British Museum. Not only Sargon’s official seals but also those of all his sons who ruled after him were preserved in Igbo Ukwu! Sargon was also identified with Biblical Nimrud. Both Sargon’s and Nimrud’s known Sumerian emblems are found in Igbo Ukwu (plates 1a-k). One of the artifacts (famously called an altar-stand) portrays a man and a woman standing back to back. The man bears the Seal of Sargon on his forehead and the Sumerian pictograph for ‘Bara’, from which is derived Egyptian word ‘Pharaoh’ and Hindu word ‘Bharat’. His two hands form the word A-KAD in mirror-image (plate 1a, b)! Sargon is understood to be the same as Biblical Nimrud, both in his name and symbols. The artifact also features Serpent Writing which is an ancient writing form known to Hindus and Phoenicians alike.
Our discoveries suggest strongly that the present neighboring towns of Igbo Ukwu and Oraeri are standing on the ruin of the lost city of Akkad – the city of the Chaldean Magi located in the land the Sumerians called ‘Land of BU’: the colonialists called it EBO and the natives call it IGBO. L.A. Waddell in Makers of Civilization, insists that the name Sargon/Shargon when properly read in Sumerian means SHA-ERI-GAN – ‘EMPEROR ERI OF THE GARDEN OF EDEN’! Local legends say that Ora-Eri - ‘Eri Folk’ were the original inhabitants of the land where the excavations were found, having been driven out in war by the present inhabitants. Eri is the putative ancestor of the Kwa/Qa tribes of Nigeria and Ghana. True to type, many Sumerians god-kings proudly bore the Nigerian title Qa/Kwa.
Akkad is the Ancient City of Ayodhya of Indian Ramayana Epic
Akkad, otherwise called Agade in Sumerian texts, was known by the name Ayodhya in Indian epic tale Ramayana. L.A. Waddell in his comparative translations of Pre-cuneiform Sumerian texts with Indus Valley Purana epics and Aryan epic texts (the Eddas) observed that the king-lists of Sumer were exactly the same with those of the Lower Indus, the Aryans of Europe and of Pre-dynastic Egypt. The Sumerian name of Sargon is SHAR KIN. SARKIN is the Nigerian word for ‘KING’ in one of the many ethnic languages of Nigeria! Many Sumerian names of kings have survived in Nigeria. One king of Sargon’s line was called Gani Eri. Another was called Attah, to name a few. These are existing names of Nigerian royal houses. Sumerians introduced saddled horses to the world. A saddled horse with a rider was found in the grave of the Monarch buried in Igbo Ukwu. Many other sacred emblems of Sumer too numerous to mention here, were among the excavations. These will be listed in our new forthcoming book on the subject titled Eden in Sumer on the Niger. In fact Thurstan Shaw noted repeatedly that many of the artifacts look Indian in style. One such seal is the elephant-head seal of Narmer, the grandson of Sargon the Great (plate 2a, b). It also bears the quadrangle emblem of Sargon.
Akkad is the Ancient City of Ayodhya of Indian Ramayana Epic
All Sumerian emperors bore the title “King of Eden (Edin) Land”. Their symbols for Eden are: A Crescent Moon hugging a Sun disc (plate 3), and an X with two opposite ends joined (plate 4a). This latter symbol is the commonest earth-goddess symbol in Igbo land (plate 4b). According to Sumerian texts, these two symbols also have the meaning of “rising and setting sun”. Sargon’s father claims to have conquered the “land of the Rising and the Setting Sun and his great grand-son king Gani-Eri was recorded to have ruled a Sun Temple. Archaeologists of the University of Nigeria have been conducting research in Pre-Historic iron smelting sites in Enugu State since two decades. Smelting materials from one of the sites, recently returned a date of 2,000 B.C., which is so far, the oldest date for iron smelting in the world and coincides with the demise of the Sumerian civilization. This particular iron smelting site houses a Pre-historic monument of a ‘Temple of the Sun’ created with hundreds of huge iron slag piled into the shape of a crescent Moon hugging a Sun-disc (plate 3b, compare with 3a above)! The native priests who worship at the ancient shrine claim that the disc (mound) in the center of the crescent moon symbol is covering a hole leading into a bottomless pit! The Egyptian Book of the Dead records that the Duat where the Pharaohs go for the Afterlife is an underground construction located in Heliopolis (‘City of the Sun’) in Eden, and that it has an opening into the earth called An/Anu (Biblical On), meaning “Hole”. The Igbo word for ‘Hole’ is Onu. We have demonstrated in a recent write-up published in the “Migration and Diffusion” website by Christine Pellech that all landmarks associated with the Duat of Heliopolis in Egyptian texts are found in and around this prehistoric shrine of the metal people of Enugu State. And our conclusion based on hardcore evidence, is that the Enugu ‘Temple of the Sun’ located in Lejja, Nsukka is the Egyptian Sun Temple of the lost Eden city of Heliopolis. It actually has an opening into a bottomless pit (plate 3b).
Sumerian Step Pyramids (Ziggurats) in Enugu State
Sumerians taught the world to build pyramids. Their step-pyramids were called ziggurats. Ancient Igbos built Ziggurats and buried their heroic god-men in them. The last Ziggurats of Enugu State were destroyed by the British colonialists and missionaries in the nineteen forties. An image of the last ancient Sumerian ziggurat of ancient Igbo land photographed by British anthropologist .G. I. Jones in 1932 in Udi county, Enugu state, can be seen below (plate 5).
This is the tip of the iceberg. We have authored three major publications since we began this research in 1990 – The Gram Code of African Adam, They Lived Before Adam and The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam. One of our books on the subject – They Lived Before Adam – won the International Book Awards in 2009, and featured on C-Span Book TV, New York and on Harlem Book Fair with an award (in the latter)and a special recognition (see U-Tube Videos).
Eden of the Sumerians
All Sumerian kings and emperors bore the proud title “King …Emperor of Eden (Edin) Land”. Their oldest creation stories are the same creation stories in Biblical Genesis, except that Sumerians preserved all the practical, astronomical and scientific details that are lacking in Genesis, as well as the names and identities of the Gods of Eden: the coming of the Biblical Nephilim, the genetic manipulation (creation) of Homo Erectus to bring about Homo Sapiens (Adam). In the past two decades, Science has proved the Sumerians right in every detail through Genetics, Linguistics , Paleontology and Archaeology. The Human Genome Project has proved that Adam was an offshoot of a Pre-Adam human ancestor dwelling in the Nigeria-Cameroon area of West Africa (see Plate 10). Before 300,000 B.C This corroborates our thesis illustrated in They Lived Before Adam (2009) where we demonstrated with paleontological and archaeological evidence that 7 million years old Toumai man of Chad – ancestor of Homo Erectus - known scientifically as Sahelanthropus Tchadensis – a relative of the Ape man - who was discovered in 2002 by French Professor Michel Brunet, was the direct ancestor Ugwuele man who lived in Igbo land before 500,000 B.C. all the way to the Late Stone Age (see plate 9b). The Toumai man of Chad and the Ugwuele man of Nigeria - both border nations - make a final case for a West, rather an East African origin of Mankind. A Nigerian location of Eden implies a Nigerian location of Sumer, and vice versa.
As if these are not shocking enough, we find that a sizable number of ancient inscribed Stone monoliths discovered in 1970 in the virgin forests, villages and under the ground in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria (in Cross River and Akwa Ibom States) bear the faces of apes (plate 6)! The Egyptian Book of the Dead claims that Ape-men called Khemennu were the Primeval Ancestors of Humanity as well as the Scribes of the Duat in Heliopolis, and that their symbolic number was eight. The eight-pointed star is the symbol of their Khemennu city or Khammasi city (in Sumerian). Nigerian monoliths actually bear the eight-pointed star of the Khammasi/Khemennu gods of Sumer and Egypt. The Khemennu scribes of Ikom – who needless to say - are the same Khemmenu Primeval Ancestors of Sumer and Egypt actually share this symbol with Nze na Ozo god-men and Initiates of Igbo land (see plate 8)! What this suggests is that the Ape men authors of the monoliths were intelligent beings. Perhaps humanity may need to search into the actual family of apes for its real ancestors! This opinion, though seemingly outlandish, is borne out of the fact that several cases of recorded oral traditions of internal migrations of various Nigerian peoples into the Lower Niger Delta, claim that migrants encountered intelligent ape-men aboriginal residents with tails, who traded with, or resisted the advance of the migrants. As unscientific as this may sound, the tails indicate that Homo Erectus was more ape than man! Yet he was intelligent enough to write on rock, as recorded in the Nigerian monoliths and in the famous Hindu Ramayan epic, where the ape Hanuman is depicted as an intelligent ape-man who could write verses on stone – a Sumerian/Nigerian story never-the-less! Hanuman was probably the Egyptian god Thoth, the leader of the Primeval Ancestors of The Book of the Dead - the Khemennu ape-men of Sumer in Eden.
We Call on the British Museum Authorities
For over three years, we have been studying the pottery and bronze inscriptions on the hundreds of artifacts and potsherds excavated by Thurstan Shaw at Igbo Ukwu and have demonstrated that they are mostly letters found in orthographies of almost every ancient Middle Eastern civilization. The direction of borrowing is more than obvious. The result of this study is carefully catalogued in our latest publication in the series – The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam – Unearthing Heliopolis – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India (2010). Armed with these findings, the Catherine Acholonu Research Center, Abuja, Nigeria, hereby calls on the British Museum authorities to release for autopsy and proper dating, the remains of the monarch whose partially decayed bones were excavated in Igbo Ukwu in 1950 by Thurstan Shaw.
The monarch’s bones were partially preserved through contact with rows of copper wires adorning his arms and legs. He wore a copper crown engraved with the official emblem of Sargon the Great, a forehead Sun-disc, a breastplate of copper and a regalia strung with one hundred and eleven thousand coloured carnelian beads! Other emblems of Sargon the Great and his royal line taken from Igbo Ukwu were: a Roped Bronze Vase. The roped design consists of quadrangles – the official emblem of Sargon the Great; an Alter Stand with the image of a man and a woman standing back to back. The man bears two other Sargon emblems on his forehead and on his belly-button, one of which is a double concentric circle.
The cache of goods excavated in Igbo Ukwu would fill two museums. A few of the artifacts are located in Nigerian museums, but the bulk of them are hidden away in the British Museum and Nigerians are not allowed to access them. The civilization in question, like all other Sumerian civilizations in Nigeria, is outside living memory of the natives of Igbo land, and only exists in long forgotten folklore. The excavated city of Akkad was found four to five meters deep beneath the foundations of buildings of the present town of Igbo Ukwu. Natives still dig up grooved pottery and bronze-wares while digging cisterns in every part of the town, as well as in the neighboring town of Oraeri up to this very day. This indicates a thriving civilization in its time. The Igbo Ukwu bronze casting method differs from other Nigerian Bronzes in the use of Tin – technique employed by the Sumerian Chaldeans; and in the use of the lost wax method. Igbo Ukwu bronze is also in a class of its own in the delicacy and exquisitely ornate nature of its designs. We have identified the locations of other lost cities of Pre-Historic and Pre-Deluge Sumer in various parts of Nigeria, as well as various landmarks that feature in Sumerian literature and mythology. Sumerians sought to duplicate landmarks from their original homeland in their new places of abode. Accordingly, the Niger-Benue confluence rivers of their Olden Texts gave way to the Tigris and Euphrates confluence rivers in their new cities in Babylon and Mesopotamia.
We Invite the International Media
These discoveries call for the redefinition of the parameters of Knowledge, a remapping of the course of human civilization and, I daresay, a re-writing of our History books. Accordingly, the Researchers of the Catherine Acholonu Research Center are inviting the international media to a series of world Press Conferences in Abuja, New York, London, Dubai, New Delhi and Beijing to enable us demonstrate our findings to the world. Dates will be communicated in due course.
IMAGES FILE EVIDENCE
All Sumerian textual images listed here are from L.A. Waddell – Makers of Civilization in Race and History, London, 1921. They consist of an upper line from texts recovered in excavations in Mesopotamia featuring Indus type Sumerian letters (upper line) in comparison with actual Mesopotamian-type pictographs, all of them pre-cuneiform. Our listings indicate a generic connection between West African, Middle Eastern and Indus valley inscriptions of the Sumerian mother-culture. All bronze/copper artifacts listed here are from the Thurstan Shaw excavations,
All Sumerian textual images listed here are from L.A. Waddell – Makers of Civilization in Race and History, London, 1921. They consist of an upper line from texts recovered in excavations in Mesopotamia featuring Indus type Sumerian letters (upper line) in comparison with actual Mesopotamian-type pictographs, all of them pre-cuneiform. Our listings indicate a generic connection between West African, Middle Eastern and Indus valley inscriptions of the Sumerian mother-culture. All bronze/copper artifacts listed here are from the Thurstan Shaw excavations,