Afterlives
The Modern Myth
Since the 1970s the Anunnaki have had a second career as astronauts. The claims are worth reading beside the tablets they come from.
How the story travelled
From the reading room to the algorithm
1872
A flood story older than Genesis
Smith's lecture makes Mesopotamian myth a public scandal.
Smith reads his translation to the Society of Biblical Archaeology with the Prime Minister in the audience. The discovery that a Babylonian flood narrative predates the biblical one sets the pattern for everything that follows: the tablets are treated less as Sumerian literature than as evidence in someone else's argument.
- Venue
- Society of Biblical Archaeology, London
- Text
- Gilgamesh, Tablet XI
- Reaction
- Immediate press sensation
The name
The name means 'those who from heaven came to earth'.
The rendering comes from Zecharia Sitchin. Assyriologists read a-nun-na-ki as 'princely offspring of An' — heaven is a lineage here, not a departure point.
Examine the claim →Nibiru
A twelfth planet, Nibiru, carries the Anunnaki on a 3,600-year orbit.
Nibiru appears in Babylonian astronomy as a name for a crossing point, most often associated with Jupiter. No cuneiform text gives it an orbit or inhabitants.
Examine the claim →Engineered labour
Humans were engineered as a labour force.
Atrahasis does say people were made to bear the gods' work — but from clay, spit and the blood of a slain god, in a ritual of birth, not a laboratory.
Examine the claim →The long reigns
Kings reigning 28,800 years prove a non-human dynasty.
The King List uses a sexagesimal numeral system and a political purpose: to make scattered dynasties look like one unbroken succession. The long reigns shrink to plausible lengths after the flood.
Examine the claim →The stranger truth is the one the tablets already tell: that four thousand years ago people wrote down a story about gods who got tired of working, and it survived.