The Wars of Gods and Men: Book III of the Earth Chronicles (The Earth Chronicles)

Thousands of years ago, the Earth was a battlefield. These were the wars that would shape man's destiny—terrible conflicts that began lifetimes earlier on another planet.

Parting the mists of time and myth, the internationally renowned scholar Zecharia Sitchin takes us back in this volume to the violent beginnings of the human story, when gods—not men—ruled the Earth.

In a spellbinding reconstruction of epic events preserved in legends and ancient writings, he traces the conflicts that began on another world, continued on Earth, and culminated in the use of nuclear weapons—an event recorded in the Bible as the upheaval of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Zecharia Sitchin's Earth Chronicles series is based on the premise that mythology is not physiologically based, psychologically metaphorical, or culturally allegorical but rather the repository of ancient memories, and that the Bible ought to be read as a historical scientific document. While the debate regarding the origins of myth is far from conclusive, and the dangers of assuming that the subjectivity of the reader/researcher will not intervene are obvious, Stitchin is an expert in ancient language and history. While the reader may scoff at his unfortunately characteristic long leaps of logic resulting in conclusions (such as that gods from outer space destroyed a spaceport on the Sinai Peninsula four millennia ago), he does present some compelling ideas not easily ignored. The series, of which this is the third volume, deserves a read by those fascinated with the search for the origins of humankind who don't mind spending time separating wheat from chaff. --P. Randall Cohan