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Until the publication by Nicolaus Copernicus of his astro- nomical work De _ revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 (and for many years thereafter), the established wisdom was that the Sun, Moon and other known planets orbit the Earth. The Catholic Church, which condemned Copernicus for that heresy, officially acknowledged its mistake only 450 years later, in 1993. The first new celestial objects discovered after the inven- tion of telescopes were the four large moons of Jupiter—by Galileo, in 1610. Uranus, the planet beyond Saturn, which cannot be seen with the naked eye from Earth, was discovered with the aid of improved telescopes in 1781. Neptune was discovered beyond Uranus in 1846. And Pluto, the outermost known planet, was found only in 1930. Yet the Sumerians, millennia ago, had already depicted (see Fig. 13 and the detail, "A", opposite) a complete Solar System, with the Sun—not Earth—in the center; a Solar Sys- tem that includes Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and one more large planet ("Nibiru") as it passes between Jupiter and Mars. It was only in the 1970s that NASA satellites gave us close-up views of our neighboring planets, and only in 1986 and 1989 that Voyager-2 flew by Uranus and Neptune. Yet Sumerian texts (quoted by us in The 12th Planet) had al- ready described those outer planets exactly as NASA found them to be. The first ring surrounding Saturn was not discovered until 1659 (by Christian Huygens). Yet the imprint of an Assyrian cylinder seal on a clay envelope encasing a tablet, that shows in the celestial background the Sun, the Moon (its crescent), and Venus (eight-pointed "star"), also depicts a small planet—Mars—separated from a larger one (Jupiter) (by a straw representing the Asteroid Belt?) followed by a large ringed planet—Saturn!. ("B" opposite). BEFORE COPERNICUS AND NASA