Anunnaki (Anunna)

Did the Anunnaki make humans to work for them?

In the Babylonian poem Atrahasis they did. The poem, a story of the Flood that preceded the one in the Epic of Gilgameš, opens: “When the gods like men bore the work and suffered the toil, the toil of the gods was great, the work was heavy, the distress was much.” Then: “The Seven great Anunnaki were making the Igigu suffer the work.” What follows is broken in places, but Brisch reads it as the Igigi refusing to work any longer, which left the Anunnaki to find a solution. The solution was the creation of humans, who from then on bore the gods’ work.

The Sumerian poem Enki and Ninmah tells a similar story with a different cast. It begins in the days “when the Anuna gods were born”, when “the senior gods oversaw the work, while the minor gods were bearing the toil. The gods were digging the canals and piling up the silt in Harali.” The gods complain, Enki’s mother Namma wakes him, and he tells her how to make a substitute for them: “Impose on him the work of carrying baskets. You should knead clay from the top of the abzu.” The work these poems describe is canals, silt, clay and baskets. The gold mines and the genetic engineering come from Zecharia Sitchin’s retelling.

Were the Anunnaki aliens?

That reading is modern, and it began with Zecharia Sitchin, whose first book, The 12th Planet, came out in 1976. Born in Russia, he studied economics in London and worked as a journalist before moving to New York in 1952, the New York Times reported in 2010, and he had studied Hebrew, Akkadian and Sumerian since childhood. His account, as the Times summed it up, is that “people evolved with a little genetic intervention from ancient astronauts who came to Earth and needed laborers to mine gold to bring back to Nibiru”, a planet whose long orbit brings it near Earth every 3,600 years or so. In his version it was Enki who gave some of the visitors’ genes to Earth’s upright primates so they could work as miners. He told NBC News that the visitors were the Anunnaki of the Sumerian texts and the Nephilim of the Bible, and he read a star and eleven dots on a Sumerian cylinder seal, known as VA243, as the sun, the moon and ten planets, Nibiru among them. His books, 13 of them by 2010, had sold millions of copies in 25 languages.

The Times reported that scientists, historians and archaeologists dismiss his theories as pseudoscience and fault “his translations of ancient texts and his understanding of physics”. NBC News’s Cosmic Log reported the same year that mainstream experts on Sumerian cuneiform texts say his interpretation is wrong, and that his ideas, like those of the ancient-astronaut author Erich von Däniken, have been roundly scorned by the scientific community.

Michael S. Heiser set out the reasons in detail. He earned a PhD in Hebrew Bible and ancient Semitic languages from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, had studied Akkadian and Sumerian on his own, and was academic editor at Logos Bible Software. He came to Sitchin’s books, he wrote, as a scholar “with a lifelong interest in UFOs and paranormal phenomena”, hoping to find a kindred spirit. His case is on Sitchin Is Wrong, a website he wrote and published himself. The Mesopotamians, he points out, compiled their own dictionaries, in print since the mid-twentieth century, and the words Sitchin takes for rocket ships have no such meanings in them. Of the Sumerians knowing twelve planets, the Anunnaki travelling through space and Nibiru being a twelfth planet, Heiser wrote that “these ideas don’t exist in any cuneiform text at all”. He counted 182 occurrences of the name Anunnaki in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature and challenged Sitchin’s readers to show one that connects them with Nibiru or with any planet. He also asked why the star on VA243 is not the usual sun symbol or the symbol of the sun god Šamaš, which Ruth Horry, writing for Oracc, describes as a four-pointed star with curved lines between the points.

The Oracc entries never mention Sitchin, but two of their facts bear on his claims. Sitchin showed the Times photographs of Sumerian carvings that he said showed alien gods in space helmets and suits; Brisch writes that there are no known depictions of the Anunna, only of individual gods. And their name, in the most likely reading, means “those of princely seed”.

Nibiru in the texts and in astronomy

In Enūma eliš Nibiru belongs to Marduk. In L. W. King’s 1902 translation Marduk “founded the station of Nibir”, which King glossed as Jupiter; in the poem’s list of Marduk’s fifty names comes “Let his name be Nibiru, ‘the Seizer of the Midst’!” Sitchin knew the scholarly debate. He told NBC News that Nibiru is listed in countless Mesopotamian astronomical texts and that scholars argued in the nineteenth century over whether it was Mars or Jupiter; agreeing with neither side, he concluded that it was one more planet, on a great elliptical orbit. Heiser looked the word up in the leading dictionary of cuneiform, where scholars spell it neberu, and reported that no text has it as a planet beyond Pluto, connects it with the Anunnaki or has it pass through the solar system every 3,600 years.

As astronomy, Smithsonian Magazine classes Sitchin’s “doomsday planet Nibiru” as pseudoscience (Jesse Emspak, 2015). David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, had received almost a thousand questions about the supposed 2012 doomsday through NASA’s Ask an Astrobiologist. He traced one thread of the scare to Sitchin’s claim that Sumerian documents identify a planet passing through the inner solar system every 3,600 years, and called the books “fabulist”.