The world that permits you to read this article, watch television, surf the Internet, drive an automobile, and ride in an airplane is said to have begun in Sumer 6000 years ago when a dying star's flaring brilliance caught the attention of a primitive neolithic people and made them receptive to the advent of cultural stirrings.

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Almost "overnight" the tribes that for centuries had been contented to fight and club their way around the Mesopotamian valley somehow became skilled in the arts of civilized living. They left the risky rewards of hunting and gathering and became farmers, tending the soil and irrigating the land. They became experts in metals, ceramics, and hundreds of other skills. They constructed permanent homes, temples, towers, and pyramids where scant decades before there had been only crude tents and huts.

Berossus, the Babylonian priest-historian, credits Oannes, an amphibious half-man creature that emerged from the Persian Gulf as the teacher of enlightenment who nursed the once primitive Sumerians into creating the cradle of civilization and who guided them in writing the first love song, formulating the first school system, compiling the first directory of pharmaceutical concoctions, fashioning a balanced law code, and instituting the first parliament. Before the advent of Oannes, Berossus stated, the Sumerians "lived like beasts in the field, with no order or rule."

Sumerian astronomers became so accurate in their science that their measurements on the rotation of the Moon is off only 0.4 from modern, computerized figures.

Was the mysterious Oannes simply the symbol of the advent of sudden civilization--or was he among the survivors of a strange and alien world that existed on this planet for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years before Sumer?

At the height of the Greek Civilization, the highest known number was 10,000. After that sum, the Greek mathematicians could only fall back on "infinity." Centuries before the Greeks, the Sumerians had become master mathematicians who had achieved a series of remarkable accomplishments. A tablet found in the Kuynjik hills some years back contained a 15-digit number--195,955,200,000,000.

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