The Teachers: Oannes, the Apkallu and the Watchers as Instructors
Before the Flood · kingship comes to Eridu, 432,000 years before the Flood (Berossus)
This series asks what history looks like if the old texts are records, not myths. Each claim rests on a quoted text. It is a reading, not an established fact.
Not every faction wanted humans kept down. A mission is sent to teach. Jubilees says the Watchers came down "that they should instruct the children of men." Babylon remembers seven sages who came out of the sea, the first of them Oannes, who taught writing, law, farming and building by day and went back into the water at night. Kingship itself "descended from heaven" to the first city, Eridu.
The teaching came as objects as well as lessons. Inanna carried more than a hundred "me," the powers of civilization, from Enki's city to hers in the Boat of Heaven. The angel Uriel dictated a calendar to Enoch. Enoch was taken up alive to learn the machinery of the sky, and the same man is Idris in the Quran and Hermes in the Greek-Egyptian tradition.
What the texts say
The angels of the Lord descended on the earth, those who are named the Watchers, that they should instruct the children of men.
He gave them an insight into letters and sciences, and arts of every kind.
And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him./
And We raised him to high station.
