Imagine a world without humans.
No cities, no farms, no kings, no temples.
But the world is not empty.
Someone is already there.
The gods.
And in one of the oldest stories from
the ancient Mesopotamia, these gods are not living
an easy life, somewhere high above the humanity.
They are working.
They dig.
They carry heavy loads.
Canals have to be dug.
Earth has to be moved.
Water has to be guided across the land.
The work is hard.
The years pass.
And eventually some of the gods had enough.
In the ancient Babylonian story we now call
Atrahasis, the story begins with a situation that
sounds almost surprisingly modern.
A group of workers has gone on strike.
Except these workers are gods.
The lesser gods, known as Igigi.
They are doing the hard labor with the
greater gods' rule over them.
The pressure keeps building and finally the workers
rebel.
And suddenly the gods has a problem.
If the gods refuse to work, who is
then going to work for them?
The solution was, sorry, is humanity.
Clay is brought forward.
A god is killed.
His blood is mixed with the clay.
And from this mixture, the new being is
created.
A being capable of carrying out the burden.
Us.
Now, Zecharia Sitchin did not invent the basic
story.
The Antoshanitish tradition really does describe the gods
doing the hard physical work.
It really does describe a rebellion.
And it really does describe humanity being created
from clay and divine blood.
But what does the story actually means?
To an Assyriologist it's mythology.
To an historian of a religion it offers
a window into an ancient world where people
understood human existence through the gods, the temples,
the work and the natural orders.
But millions of people have come to see
something very different in the story.
What if the clay does not simply mean
clay?
What if the blood does not simply mean
blood?
What if the ancient text describing something people
4,000 years ago simply did not have
modern verse for?
Genetics.
And what if the gods is really not
gods?
What if they were visitors?
Not from a heaven as a religious place,
but from the heavens, literally, from another world.
From a world that in the modern version
of this story has a name, Nibiru.
And those visitors have another name, the Anunnaki.
So why are we still talking about it?
Well, the Anunnaki have become something much bigger
than a subject in the ancient religious history.
Search for the name today and you quickly
leave the world of universities and clay tablets
behind.
Instead you will find words as spacecraft, genetic
engineering, gold mines, mysterious planets, forbidden archaeology, biblical
giants, secret underground bases, and the idea that
the entire history of humanity have been built
on top of forgotten events.
Much of the modern Anunnaki story can be
traced back to one man, Zecharia Sitchin.
He was born in 1920 and in 1976
he published a book called The Twelfth Planet.
Sitchin believed the ancient Mesopotamian text has been
misunderstood.
When ancient people wrote about the gods coming
from the heavens, he believed that they were
describing real visitors.
When they wrote about objects in the sky,
he believed their astronomical knowledge is far more
advanced than modern historians are willing to accept.
And when they wrote about the creation of
humanity, he believed these stories preserved a distant
memory of biological engineering.
What makes the story so powerful is that
it does not begin with a flying saucer,
it begins with real ancient texts.
There really is an Atrahasis story.
There is really a Sumerian king list.
Enki, Idil, Anu, and Yana really appear in
the ancient texts.
They really are Mesopotamian flood stories.
Nibiru, or more precisely Nibiru, really does appear
in the ancient Mesopotamian astronomy.
And the Anu or the Anaki really do
appear in ancient writing.
In the Sumerian sources, the Anu is a
group of important gods.
In later traditions, the term becomes also to
be associated with gods of the underworld.
There is no single definition that works perfectly
for every period of the Mesopotamian history.
And that is exactly what makes this story
interesting, because the modern Anunaki story is not
created out of nothing.
It was built on ancient bricks.
The question is whenever the building made from
those bricks are still ancient, or whenever the
part is modern.
If we look at the established story, then
we need to begin in the Mesopotamia, the
land between Euphrates and Tigris rivers, a land
that roughly corresponded to modern-day Iraq and
parts of the surrounding region.
This was where some of the world's earliest
urban societies developed.
Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, Kish.
People organized farming, trade, administration, and religion on
a scale that eventually made writing necessary.
And by the end of the 4th millennium
BCE, we begin to see the early stages
of the writing tradition that would develop into
cuneiform.
And through that writing, an enormous ancient world
becomes available to us.
Accounts, contracts, school exercises,
prayers, astrological texts, mythical texts, and stories about
the gods.
One of the oldest divine figures in the
sky god is An, also known as Anu
in Akkadian.
He is a figure of authority, and in
many traditions he is considered an ancestor of
the gods.
Another major god is Enlil.
Enlil is associated with power, authority, and kingship.
And then we have Enki, known as Ea
in Akkadian.
Enki is one of the most fascinating figures
in the entire Mesopotamian pantheon.
He is associated with fresh water beneath the
earth, wisdom, craftsmanship, magic, and civilization.
And again and again he has a special
relationship with humanity.
In several stories Enki acts as humanity's protector.
In Atrahasis he plays a crucial role
in the creation of humanity and later in
its survival.
In the flood tradition he warns a human
about being about the coming disaster.
And in the story of Adapa a relationship
becomes even stranger.
Adapa is an extraordinary human closely connected to
Enki.
He gives wisdom, he gets into a conflict
with the south wind, eventually he is brought
before the sky god Anu, and there he
seems to have an opportunity to gain something
close to immortality.
But he does not receive it.
Mesopotamian mythology is deeply interested in this boundary
between gods and humans.
Where are we?
Why do we work?
Why do we die?
Why do the gods possess us something we
do not?
And somewhere inside these enormous worlds of gods
we find Anu'a.
Today Akkadian form Anunnaki is a much better
word.
But in the Sumerian text we often encounter
forms as Anu'a or Anu'a.
It's not the name of the individual gods,
it refers to a group.
Exactly which gods belong to the group can
vary.
In some texts they are the great gods,
in others they are associated with particular cities
or particular roles.
In later traditions the Anunnaki become more closely
associated with the underworld, while the Igigi may
have been associated with the gods of heaven.
And already we have a problem.
If we try to make a perfect organizational
chart of the Anunnaki, we will see the
mapping of the management structures.
Like in a modern company, the ancient sources
simply refused to cooperate.
The tradition changed, different cities favored different gods.
Names were changed, gods emerged.
One story could contradict another.
This is what happens in a living religion.
And there's also one more problem.
Some of the ancient names look like they
were specifically designed to punish everyone that pronounced
them in a podcast.
So if I accidentally injure a Sumerian consonant
along the way, I hope you will forgive
me.
But underneath all this variation one thing is
clear.
The Anunnaki are real in a sense that
the name and the gods themselves generally appear
in ancient texts.
What we do not have is a Mesopotamian
text that simply says the Anunnaki were extraterrestrials.
That sentence comes much later.
So if we look at the first cracks,
then we could say something like if the
story ended here we would not have much
of an episode.
Because some of those ancient stories are strange.
Take the creation of humanity.
In a simple modern retelling, we would
say that the Mesopotamians believed that gods created
humans.
But the details matters.
In the Atrahasis, the lesser gods performed hard
physical labor.
Among other things they dig canals.
Eventually they rebel.
So a new worker has to be created.
In the story a god is killed.
His blood becomes a part of the creation
of humanity together with clay.
Other Mesopotamian stories contain variations of the same
basic idea.
In Enki and Ninmah, clay again plays a
central role in the creation of humans.
For a modern person it is difficult to
hear the story without thinking about biology.
Materials from the earth, something taken from an
existing intelligent being, a process and then a
human is created.
That is not the same thing as genetic
engineering, but it's easy to understand why the
comparison appears.
Then we have the Sumerian king list.
The list does not begin with an ordinary
king.
It begins with kingship descending from heaven.
And in a most famous version the early
kings ruled for an astonishing length of time.
Elohim ruled for 28,800 years.
Alaga ruled for 36,000 years.
Others ruled for 33,200 years, 28,800,
21,000.
First this almost impossible length of time, then
comes the flood.
And after the flood the Rhines gradually begin
to work in something more we could recognize
as human history.
The famous Weltbrunnel prism containing the list is
real.
The numbers are there.
So why are they there?
Where are the symbols?
Religious numerology?
Where are the ancient units of time of
being used differently?
Or is the list describing rulers that were
simply not ordinary human beings?
Then there is Etana, a king who in
a Mesopotamian story rises toward heaven on the
back of an eagle.
There is Adapa who travels from the heavenly
realm of Anu.
Then there is Eunatician in the Epic of
Gilgamesh.
The man survived the great flood and is
given a special status among the gods.
Then there are the seven Apkallu, a wise
being associated with the age before the flood.
And there are descriptions of God moving between
different parts of the cosmos.
A modern reader can choose to see this
as a kind of a mythology.
Ancient people who preserve these stories probably do
not think about myth in exactly the same
way as we do.
To them the gods are very real.
But in the beginning of the 70s, a
third possibility was offered.
Not literally a supernatural gods, not simply a
fictional mythology, but ancient people describing advanced technology
with the only language available to them.
And this is where Zachariah's Scythian stories begin.
If you look at the alternatives to history,
that is where Scythian stories begin far from
Earth.
Somewhere in our solar system is another world
with extremely long and unusual orbit, Nibiru.
It travels through the solar system in a
vast cycle lasting roughly 3,600 Earth years.
Long ago intelligent life developed there.
In this story the inhabitants of Nibiru do
not necessarily look like a small gray alien
in the modern UFO culture.
They are humanoid, they live extremely long life
compared with the humans, they possess an advanced
civilization, and at some point their planet faces
a serious problem.
Here its atmosphere is in danger.
The solution is gold.
Gold can be used technologically and can be
dispensed into the atmospheres to protect the planet.
But Nibiru does not have enough easily available
gold, so inhabitants took a look toward Earth.
Around 4000, I try again, around 450,000
years ago the expeditions begin.
One of the most important missions was led
by Enki.
In ancient Mesopotamian religion Enki is the god
of wisdom, freshwater, craftsmanship, and civilization.
In the Anunnaki story those qualities become clues
into his real role.
He was the scientist, the engineer, the one
who understood nature, and the one who will
eventually develop a special relationship with humanity.
The first operations are centered about Mesopotamia, but
it becomes clear that large quantity of gold
can be found further south in Africa.
The Anunnaki established mining operations, and this is
where another group enters the story, the Igigi.
The Igigi really do appear in the ancient
texts as a group of gods.
In Etrahedes they are forced to perform different
labor under the authority of the greater gods,
which in modern alternative interpretation this become a
crucial clue.
Why would gods stick?
Why would gods become exhausted?
Why would gods rebel because of physical labor?
If the story is purely religious, those questions
can be answered symbolically, but if the story
is the started memory of a real history,
then it takes a very different meaning.
The Igigi were the workforce, and after a
long period of labor they rebelled.
They refused to continue, and now the Anunnaki
has a practical problem.
They have the technology, they have the infrastructure,
they need the resources, but their workers will
no longer work.
They need a replacement.
Earth has already primitive hominids.
They are strong, they are adapted to the
planet, but they lack the intelligence and organizational
ability needed to become an efficient workforce.
Enki proposes a solution.
Instead of creating life from nothing, they can
improve the life that already exists.
An earth species can be combined with biological
material from the Anunnaki themselves.
In this interpretation, the ancient story of clay
and divine blood begins sounds more like technical.
The clay represents existing biological material from earth.
The blood of the god provides the missing
component.
A mother figure often connected with the Nihursag
or other Mesopotamian birth goddesses takes the roles
of the biological specialist.
Experiments are carried out.
Not all of them succeed.
The ancient work Enki and Ninmah contains unusual
descriptions of people created with different physical limitations,
which the gods assigned each of them to
play a role in the society.
In the technological interpretation, these scenes look like
memories of experimentation, trials, failures, adjustments, and eventually
the human was created as we recognize them,
Homo sapiens.
But the new human has a problem from
the Anunnaki point of view.
The first individuals cannot reproduce freely.
That makes sense if they were designed as
workers.
Their numbers can be controlled, but at some
points the design changes.
Humans gain their ability to reproduce on their
own, and something fundamental changes.
The population grows, the humans spread, and they
become more difficult to control.
This is where the biblical stories become interesting
in their theory.
In Genesis we find Adam and Eve.
Humanity initially lives in a special garden.
There is a tree connected with knowledge, there
is another tree connected with eternal life.
After humans gain knowledge, the divine authority becomes
concerned that they may also get immortality.
Humanity leaves the gardens.
Sitchin's interpretation connects this story with Mesopotamian traditions.
The crucial loss is not simply innocence, it
is access.
Humans have gained a new form of knowledge,
but they do not receive the long life
of the gods.
The story of Adapa became especially important.
Adapa is Enki's human.
He is unusually wise.
After a conflict with the Saurfang, he is
summoned to the realm of Anu.
Enki prepares him for what will happen.
Adapa is offered blood and drink.
He refuses, but that food and drink may
have given him immortality.
So humanity receives wisdom, but not eternal life.
Why?
Within the Anunnaki model, the answer is that
humanity was created as a limited version of
its creators.
Intelligent enough to work, intelligent enough to build
civilization, but not the full lifespan of the
Anunnaki.
And that leads to another major part of
the theory.
The strange lifespans of the ancient gods and
kings.
If the Anunnaki homeworld completes one orbit every
3,600 Earth years, then a single cycle
on the world would correspond to thousands of
years of history.
So when ancient traditions describe gods and early
rulers living for enormous lengths of time, perhaps
those numbers were not symbolic at all.
Perhaps they reflected a different way of measuring
time.
The Sumerian king list becomes a kind of
a fossil from a long stage.
Before the flood, kings ruled for tens of
thousands of years.
After the flood, the numbers fail.
Later, royal lifespan become human.
This fits the idea that the direct presence
of the gods slowly disappears.
The ancient world moves from the age of
the gods to the age of the demigods
and finally into the age of the humans.
But the Anunnaki were not one perfectly united
group.
And this is where Enki and Enlil become
central.
Enki feels sympathy for humanity.
He is involved in our creation.
He teaches humans.
He helps them.
Enlil sees things differently.
Humanity was created for a purpose.
Humans were supposed to work.
They were supposed to maintain the established order.
But over time, there are too many of
them.
In Antiochus, this is exactly the problem that
develops.
Humanity begins to disturb the divine order.
Enlil drives different disasters to reduce human population.
And finally, the flood comes.
But Enki warns Atrahasis.
In the later Gilgamesh tradition, we find the
story again through eunuchism.
In the Bible, he becomes Noah, one man
who receives a warning.
A vessel is built.
The disaster comes and life survives.
The Anunnaki theory sees the floods as the
memory of a real global, or at least,
should we say, enormous catastrophe that the Anunnaki
knew was coming.
In some versions of the theory, the disaster
is connected directly with Nibiru passing through the
solar systems.
Gravity, ice sheets, rising oceans, geological upheaval.
Enlil does not want humanity to be warned.
Enki does it anyway.
And this is why the ancient conflict between
the two becomes so important.
Enki becomes humanity's protector.
Enlil becomes the authority.
Not necessarily evil, but far more willing to
allow humanity to die if the larger plan
requires it.
After the flood, a new age begins.
Humanity survives.
Agriculture is restored.
Cities rise again.
Kingship returns.
And this is where the famous line in
the Sumerian king list becomes so important.
After the flood has swept over the land,
kingship once again descended from the heaven.
For the theory, that is, the wording is
remarkable.
Kingship does not simply develop.
It comes down.
Civilization is a gift.
And this fits another recurring Mesopotamian idea.
Enki is associated with what is called the
me.
This can be understood as divine powers, institutions,
or principles behind civilization.
Kingship, priesthood, crafts, music, writing, the functions of
society itself.
In the alternative interpretation, the me sounds almost
like a package of civilization technology.
Humanity is not only given a new body,
we were thought.
And this also provides an explanation of why
Sumer appears so impressive.
Cities, writing, mathematics, astronomy, law, administrations, monumental
architecture.
In popular presentations, civilization seems to suddenly explode
into existence.
If the Anunnaki were the teachers, then Sumer
was not really the beginning.
It is the place where something much older
is handed down to humanity.
And that idea leads directly to the Apkallu.
In Mesopotamian tradition, the Apkallu are wise beings.
They are associated with special knowledge.
Some traditions place seven of them into the
flood.
They bring wisdom and civilization.
They can appear as human-like figures, sometimes
associated with fish, and later as winged beings.
Within the alternative theory, they become specialists, teachers,
representatives of the old world.
And perhaps this is where the story connects
to other cultures.
Because all over the world, we find stories
about beings that come from the and teach
humanity the foundations of civilization.
Egypt has its gods.
Mesopotamia has the culture of heroes.
The Andes has a story connected with Yakuka.
Greek mythology has Prometheus, who gives fire to
the human.
And in the Bible, humanity gains knowledge through
an encounter with a supernatural being.
So the theory asks, are these independent myths?
Or are they local memories of a shared
past?
And this is where Nibiru becomes the key
to the entire story.
Sitchin interpreted Mesopotamian astronomical traditions as clues pointing
towards a planet moving through the solar system.
The ancient Akkadian word Nibiru is connected with
ideas such as crossing or passage.
In Inua, the name is associated with Matuk.
In the alternative model, that meaning something very
literally.
The planet has crosses, a world traveling, has
long orbit, a world that appears in the
inner solar system only every several thousand years.
Sitchin also believed that Mesopotamian art revealed surprisingly
advanced knowledge of the solar system.
One cylinder seal in particular is known as
VA 243, became famous.
It contains a star-like symbol surrounded by
smaller round objects.
Sitchin interpreted the central symbol as
the sun.
The smaller objects become planets.
And he believed the map shows more worlds
than the ancient people should have known about.
But supporters of the theory, this obvious question
is, if people 5,000 years ago only
could see five planets with the naked eye,
how could they know about a larger solar
system?
The answer is simple.
Someone took them.
Someone who came from somewhere else.
And this also explains why the Anunnaki becomes
gods.
Imagine a person from the stone age encountering
technology thousands of years beyond anything they have
ever seen.
Flying machines, advanced medicine, long distance communication, weapons,
astronomy, the ability to manipulate living organisms.
That person would not call the visitors astronauts.
The word does not exist.
They would describe them as using the highest
concept of their culture, possessed, and that would
be gods.
Which in the theory, ancient people do not
necessarily misunderstand what they say.
They simply described it using the language available
to them.
Heaven, fire, divine chariots, shining clothing, terrifying weapons,
eternal or nearly eternal life.
And it is not necessary for every god
in every Mesopotamian story to represent an extraterrestrial
being.
Over thousands of years, history becomes a religion.
Real individuals become gods, technology becomes ritual, political
conflicts become cosmic battles, and actual events become
mixed with poetry.
This is why the story is not looking
for one tablet that literally says we are
extraterrestrials.
It is looking for the pattern, the god's
work.
They come from the heavens.
They created humanity.
They mix divine material with material from earth.
Humans take over the world.
A group of wise beings teaches humanity.
Kings rule for impossible lengths of time.
A catastrophe destroys the world.
A chosen family survives.
And after that, civilization and kingship return.
Seems as one complete story, the Anunnaki theory
becomes much more than a story about aliens.
It becomes an alternative history of humanity.
Human beings are not the sole creators of
civilization.
We inherit it.
And perhaps we ourselves are the products of
someone who came before us.
If you look at the rabbit hole, then
once you accept this possibility, the story grows
very quickly.
One of the first paths leads into the
Bible.
In Genesis chapter 6 we encounter the Nephilim.
The passage is short.
The sons of God see the daughters of
men.
They have children with them.
The Nephilim are on Earth during this period.
In modern popular culture, the Nephilim are often
described as giants.
Sitchin became interested in the Hebrew word and
connected it with the Hebrew root meaning to
fall.
He therefore understood the Nephilim as something like
those who came down.
Which in the Anunnaki theory, the connection seems
obvious.
A group of non-human beings, they come
down, they have children with human women, and
the results are unusual offsprings.
Later Jewish traditions about the watchers takes the
rabbit hole even deeper.
In the book of Enoch, heavenly beings descended
to earth.
They take human women, they teach humanity forbidden
knowledge: metalworking, astrology, cosmetics, weapons, and their interference
in this disaster.
Once again, we see the basic theme.
Beings from above give humanity knowledge that changes
civilization.
Then there is the Apkallu, seven wise beings
before the flood.
In later Mesopotamian traditions, they are connected with
ritual, kingship, and divine knowledge.
Enki is himself closely connected to these wise
figures.
If we place the watchers, the Apkallu, the
Anunnaki, on top of one another, a tempting
possibility appears.
The same event, three cultures, three languages, three
different versions, and then we arrive in Africa.
Michael Tillinger is one of the most visible
supporters of the idea that the ancient structures
and mining activity in southern Africa may be
connected with the Anunnaki's search for gold.
This branch of the theory focuses on ancient
mines, stone circles, ruins, tunnels, gold deposits, and
one central questions.
How far back does the mining really go?
There is no doubt that pre-colonial mining
existed in southern Africa.
The region has a long history of mining,
metal working, and trade, but in the Anunnaki
story, those traces are pushed much further back
in time, hundreds of thousands of years.
Structures are interpreted as remains of massive industrial
systems.
Stone circles become more the settled, or should
we say, cattle enclosures.
They become parts of a much larger technological
network, and suddenly the gold connects back to
Antarhasis.
The gods perform hard labor.
The workers rebel.
Humanity is created.
If that labor was mining, another piece seems
to fall into place.
Another rabbit hole leads to Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh stands somewhere between history and legend.
His name appears in the Sumerian king list.
Later, he becomes the central figure in one
of the oldest great works of literature in
human history.
He is described as extraordinary, almost divine.
In later epic tradition, he is two-third
god and one-third human.
From ancient aliens descriptions like that are fascinating.
Are demigods simply mythological ways of describing kings?
Or could this tradition preserve memories of hybrids?
The question becomes more interesting because ancient kings
are sometimes treated as divine.
The boundary between god and human is not
always the same as in modern monotheistic religions.
And then we reach into a very modern
rabbit hole, the Iraq war.
For years, stories have circulated online claiming that
the 2003 invasion of Iraq had a secret
archaeology motive, that someone was searching for the
tomb of Gilgamesh, that ancient technology was hidden
beneath the ruins, that museums and archaeologists' sites
were deliberately targeted because of what they contained.
There's no solid evidence supporting that story, but
it shows how far the Anunnaki universe has
expanded.
It's not only about Sumer.
It becomes a master story.
The Bible, Egypt, India, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Africa, Mars,
the moon, secret technology, military operations, almost anything
can be connected to it.
And that is both the theory's greatest strength
as a story and its greatest mythological danger.
Because if an explanation becomes large enough to
explain everything, it becomes very difficult to imagine
what it could ever prove is wrong.
We will come back to that, but first
we will need to return to the clay
tablets and ask a very simple question.
What does the clay tablets actually say?
If we look at the critics, the strongest
The strongest argument against Sitchin is not that aliens don't
exist.
We know they don't.
And the strongest argument is not ancient people
were stupid.
They were clearly not.
The problem began much earlier with the translations,
because if the theory is based on Mesopotamia
and checks the words themselves have to support
the interpretation.
Let's begin with Anunnaki.
In the popular version of Sitchin's interpretation, the
name is often translated as something close to
those who from heaven came to earth.
But that is not the standard as you
as you logical understanding of the word.
Academic sources treat Anu or Anunnaki as a
term for a group of gods.
Possible interpretations of the name are closer to
ideas such as priceless offspring or priceless seed.
And the meaning and the use of the
term changed over time.
That's immediately removed one of the most important
linguistic foundations from the theory.
Not because the Anunnaki is absent from the
text.
They are there.
But because the name itself does not tell
us that they came as space travelers.
Then we have Nibiru.
Nibiru or Nibiru are real.
That's important.
Sitchin did not invent the word.
But in the known ancient sources it is
not used as a clear name of an
unknown inhabited planet following a fixed 3,600 year
orbit.
In astronomical and religious texts Nibiru are associated
with Marduk and can in astronomical context be
identified with Jupiter.
The important point is not that every single
use of the word must mean exactly the
same thing.
Ancient astronomical terminology was not always that simple.
The important point is that what the word
does not describe.
A planet called Nibiru populated by the Anunnaki
orbiting the sun every 3,600 years.
That complete system comes from Sitchin's reconstruction.
Then there is the lost book of Inki.
The title can easily give the impression that
archaeologists discovered an ancient book containing Inki's personal
memoirs.
They did not.
Sitchin published the book in 2001.
It is his modern reconstructions of a narrative
built from different ancient sources and from his
own interpretations of them.
That does not make the book useless.
It is extremely important if we want to
understand Sitchin's universe.
But we cannot take a statement from the
lost book of Inki and use it as
evidence for what 4000 years old clay tablet
actually says.
That would be circular reasoning.
Then we come to the creations of humanity.
And there the Argonaut and Anunnaki story are
something much more interesting to work with.
Because clay and divine blood really do appear
in the ancient traditions.
But the text does not say DNA, it
does not say gene, it does not say
chromosome, they do not say laboratory.
To arrive at genetic engineering we have to
translate the symbols one additional time.
Bloods become DNA, clay becomes hominid biological material,
birth goddesses become genetic engineers.
That is a possible interpretation, but the text
does not require it.
And the problem becomes larger when we look
at what we actually know about human evolution.
Human homo sapiens does not suddenly appear in
archaeological records around 100 or 200 thousand years
ago without evolutionary ancestors.
Fossils from places like Jebel Irhoud in Morocco
shows early human sapiens features dating back roughly
300 000 years.
Genetics also reveal our close relationship with other
hominids and our interbreeding with groups such as
Neanderthals and the Denisovans.
Human history does not look like a single
laboratory event, it does look like evolution, complex,
branching, slow in some ways, faster than others.
None of it, none of that can philosophically
prove that nobody ever interfered with the human
biology, but we do not have genetic evidence
that requires that explanation.
Then there is supposedly the sudden appearance of
civilization.
It makes it for a powerful story, hunter
-gatherers and then suddenly Sumer.
But archaeology contains a great deal of between
the two points.
Agriculture developed thousands of years before the classical
Sumerian city-states.
Permanent settlement grew, trade networks expanded, pottery changed,
social hierarchies developed, administrative systems became increasingly
complex, cities did not appear out of nowhere,
they have a long prehistory, the same with
the true writing.
Cuneiform did not suddenly appear as a complex
writing system delivered in a box.
We can follow the development from administrative symbols
and science into increasingly complex written languages.
That makes the rise of Sumerian legends sudden,
but at least to me not less impressive.
Then there is the Sumerian king list.
The enormous reign of Linth are really in
the text, but the document itself shows clear
signs of literary or political construction.
It combines myth, legend, ideology and historical information.
We also know that some dynasties presented one
after another in the list actually overlapped.
So the king list is not a modern
canonical database, it's ideology, history, theology and the
literature inside the same document.
The enormous number still deserves an explanation, but
they do not automatically require rulers who live
for thousands of years.
Then there's the cylinder seal called VA 243.
Tietjen interpainted its central star
-like symbol as the sun and the surrounding
dots as planets, but Mesopotamian art use star
symbols in religious and astronomical ways that do
not map neatly onto modern diagrams of the
solar system.
The established interpretations does not treat the image
as a technical map showing all the planets
in our solar system.
And then there is a larger problem.
If ancient Mesopotamian astronomers knew about Uranus, Neptune
and an unknown world called Nibiru, we would
expect that knowledge to appear elsewhere in their
extensive astronomical traditions.
And Mesopotamian astronomers were extremely skilled.
That is precisely why their surviving texts are
so valuable.
They observed Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, the
Moon, the Sun, the movement of stars, eclipses.
They produced extensive astronomical records, but the advanced
model of the solar system reconstructed by Tietjen
does not appear clearly in those records.
And then there is the gold.
Mesopotamian mythologies describe divine labor.
That is true.
Atrahasis describes digging.
That's also true.
But there's a gap between the gods dug
canals and extraterrestrials operated gold mines in southern
Africa.
The gap is filled by the modern theory,
not by the ancient texts.
The African mines do not provide the missing
connection onto their own.
Ancient humans were perfectly capable of mining.
Mining is a human technology.
To turn an ancient mine into an Anuragian
mine, we need something more.
A datable artifact, an unknown material, an inscription,
technology that clearly does not belong to the
period.
Something independently connecting the site with either Mesopotamia
or non-human civilization.
We do not have that evidence, and that
brings us to the fundamental challenge.
The Anunnaki theory is powerful when it combines
different motifs, but when it becomes much weaker
when each link is examined separately.
Divine blood is there.
DNA is not.
Nibiru is there.
The inhabited planet with the 3,600-year orbit
is not.
The Anunnaki are there.
The space travel is not.
The Igigi work, but the texts do not
say they were digging gold.
The kings had enormous Orion length, but the
king is not a precise chronological record.
So we are not dealing with a completely
invented story building from nothing.
What we have is something much more interesting.
Authentic ancient motifs connected through a modern interpretive
framework.
So what actually holds up?
If we look separately at the pieces, then
let's look at what's documented.
The Anunnaki are real as figures in the
Mesopotamian region and religion.
They appear in cuneiform texts.
They are not only individual gods, and they
are not necessarily the same group in every
historical period.
An and Anu are real.
Enlil is real.
Enki is real.
The Igigi are real.
The Atrahasis story is real.
The story of the gods doing hard labor
is real.
The rebellion is there.
The creation of humanity using clay and divine
blood is there.
The flood tradition is there.
Adapa is there.
Gilgamesh is there.
The Apkallu are there.
The Sumerian king list is real.
The enormous reigns before the floods are really
written into it.
Nibiru is real.
Mesopotamian terms connected with the heavens.
That is an impressive list, and it explains
why the Anunnaki theory has survived much longer
than many other ancient alien theories.
Because almost every time someone says that is
completely made up, a supporter can open an
ancient text and say, no, it's actually here.
And sometimes the supporter is right.
If you know what's probable, then the people
of Mesopotamia used myth to understand work, kingship,
death, natural disasters, humanity's role in the world,
and the relationship between the gods and humans.
Those stories changed over centuries.
Gods gained new roles.
Old stories were reused.
Political centers influenced religion.
The rise of Marduk in Babylon is a
good example.
Babylon became more powerful.
The god of Babylon became more powerful too.
Then there is what is possible.
Could a real event lie beneath the earth?
Of course.
That happens all the time.
Floods can become flood legends.
Historical kings can become legendary heroes.
Wars become epic.
Natural events become battles between gods.
The human memory and oral tradition can preserve
surprisingly ancient echoes.
So we do not have to choose between
everything is literally true or everything is invented.
But then we reach into this speculative layer
that Nibiru is an inhabitant planet, that following
a precise 3,600-year orbit, that the Anunnaki
came from that planet, that they arrived on
Earth 450,000 years ago, that they needed
gold, that the Egege operated mines in Africa,
that Homo sapiens was genetically engineered as a
slave species, that Enki and Enlil were historical
extraterrestrial beings, that the flood was caused by
the return of Nibiru, that certain biblical figures
were Anunnaki-human hybrids. That is the complete Sitchin
module, but that complete story does not appear
in known ancient texts.
It has to be reconstructed.
And I think that's the most important distinction
in the entire story.
There is a difference between a text and
the interpretation of a text.
So who were the Anunnaki?
If we stay with what we actually can
document, they were a category, a group of
gods which in religious world of ancient Mesopotamia.
Not necessarily the same group in every period,
not clearly defined biological species, and not documented
as visitors from an unknown planet.
Mainstream Assyriology therefore does not give us Sitchin's
Anunnaki. But Sitchin did not invent all of
it on the raw material either.
And that is exactly why the story refuses
to disappear, because underneath Nibiru, the spacecraft and
the gold mines, there are some generally ancient
questions.
Why does it say that the gods has
to work?
Why was humanity created to take over that
burden?
Why is divine blood mixed with earth?
Why did ancient people imagine kings ruling for
tens of thousands of years?
Why does kingship descend from heaven?
Why do wise beings repeatedly appear in ancient
stories and bring knowledge to humanity?
We do not need extraterrestrials to ask those
questions.
And perhaps the ancient stories actually lose something
if our only goal is to reduce them
into a form of technology or fantasy.
Because for the people who wrote them, that
was not science fiction, that was the description
of their world, a world which in human
beings stood themselves between the earth and heaven,
a world where civilization was something the gods
has given them, where knowledge came with a
price, where immortality belonged to somebody else, where
the great catastrophe that once separated an ancient
world from the new one, thousands of years
later we are still reading their words.
Some people see gods, others see extraterrestrial visitors,
and others see poetry, politics, religion and humanity
trying to understand itself.
I think the important thing is knowing that
when we are reading the ancient texts and
when we are adding something to it, because
perhaps the greatest mystery of the Anunnaki is
not when they came from another planet, perhaps
the greatest mystery is how a collection of
very old stories from Mesopotamia survived long enough
to become a story about humanity all over
again.
And only now the heavens of gods has
become an outer space, and the clay tablets
has become DNA.
So, thank you for listening, and see you
next week.