Doctor Fate: In the Dungeon of the Damned

Chapter 2 - Secret Origins

Nergal, Nabu, Anu, the great hall where he saw the ghoulish god lying in wait for him, the great hall that had once been his home, and most of all, Inza... touchstones of his past, his present, combined with the shock, the sheer horror induced by the visage of the god of death, caused Kent Nelson to see his life replayed in an instant before him...

...There were the early days of his young boyhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1908, and where his father, Sven Nelson, was an associate professor and rising star in the Department of Archaeology at Harvard. He recalled little of this time, aside from the hole left by the death of his mother, a mother he never really knew. Her death had set off something in his father, however, something akin to wanderlust combined with the need to confront ultimate realities, a spiritual yearning seeking a material resolution –

And this led his father, in the year 1920, to head an expedition to Ur in southern Iraq, which had recently passed from the control of the Ottoman Empire to that of Great Britain. Only a year earlier, Henry Hall had worked on some preliminary excavations at Ur, but, like Sir Leonard Woolley who would follow him, Hall had focused his attentions on the Ziggurat of Ur. Sven Nelson was far more ambitious; he wanted to find the lost Temple of the Annunaki, a building supposedly four times the size of the ziggurat Woolley uncovered (to international acclaim and lasting fame), but one whose existence most "serious" archaeologists doubted. Among those few who knew about his actual ambitions, Nelson was considered something of a maverick, if not an outright lunatic, for searching for the mythic Temple that many were certain was pure legend. But even those few in whom Nelson had confided something of his secret ambition didn't know the half of it. Nelson was also of the belief that the Annunaki had descended from beings from another world, and that they had helped build the monumental structures of ancient Mesopotamia, and had even instructed the Egyptians in the building of the Great Pyramids.

Such beliefs in those days were typically held by small groups of people ignorant of the engineering knowledge of the ancients, or by Eurocentric chauvinists and outright racists who held the capabilities of the present-day inhabitants of the region in such contempt that they could not extend credit even to their ancestors. But Sven Nelson's beliefs were inspired insteadby his research into the arcane, which had been prompted by his chance discoveries in Ur of ancient writing, materials, and technologies that had no earthly, human explanation. These discoveries he had kept secret until he could find better proof of his hypothesis of extra-terrestrials living among ancient Earth civilizations as gods.

The elder Nelson knew something that his fellow archaeologists in the area did not: he had deciphered a text written during the reign of Ur-Nammu that spoke of the Temple of the Annunaki and hinted at its location near the great Ziggurat of Ur. Mesopotamian scholars had long been baffled that the much documented Annunaki had constituted a pantheon of Sumerian deities, like the Greek gods of Olympus or the Norse gods of Asgard, and yet no artwork depicting them in a group had been found, let alone a building or location devoted to them. Sven Nelson believed he had found just such a place, however, by deciphering coded messages in mystical cuneiform cylinders that on the surface appeared to be mere records of commercial transactions.

His confidence in his find was confirmed by a chance encounter that the elder Nelson had with a Bedouin fugara in a market in Nasiriyah. The old man approached Sven Nelson in the crowded bazaar and said to him that he had heard the American was looking for the Buried Temple. The archaeologist nodded and the old man said, "It is where you imagine it to be, but deeper." Sven Nelson nodded, and then asked, "And how do you know this?"

The old man smiled. "You have been unable to hire any men to help with your dig."

Sven Nelson nodded, sighing.