The Anunnaki were ancient Sumerian gods, descended from the supreme deity An. But, some historians claim the Sumerians may have believed them to be extraterrestrial.
Before the great pantheon of ancient Greek and ancient Egyptian gods, there were gods worshiped by ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia. These people lived in the Middle East in present-day Iraq and Iran. The Anunnaki served as the chief gods of these ancient Sumerians.
The Anunnaki came from An, the chief god of gods who ruled over all gods in ancient Sumeria. They were sky gods who came from the heavens, and Babylonian creation myths say that there were 300 Anunnaki assigned to guard heaven and another 300 to guard the underworld. The Anunnaki make an appearance in The Epic of Gilgamesh as the hero is so fantastic and worthy that he judges the great gods.
Then it got weird.
Humans in ancient Mesopotamia and Sumeria, as early as 2500 B.C., began to worship Enki. Enki was a child of An, the chief Anunnaki, and he had sex with a lot of deities to fill out An’s family tree among Mesopotamian gods.
Fast forward to the 19th century. Archaeologists uncovered tens of thousands of ancient Babylonian clay tablets. The collections were so vast that research and translations on them continue to the present day.
Azerbaijani author Zecharia Sitchin wrote a book that promulgated translations of 14 specific tablets related to Enki. Called The 12th Planet, Stichin’s book claims ancient Sumerians said the Anunnaki came from a mythical planet called Nibiru.
Nibiru, according to Sitchin, has an elongated orbit of 3,600 years. When Nibiru was close to Earth at one point in the distant past, the Anunnaki decided to say “hello” to humanity around 450,000 years ago.
They landed in Sumeria. They needed gold to repair their planet’s atmosphere. The Anunnaki couldn’t mine the gold themselves, so they created a race of beings called humans to do the work for them.
Sitchin’s book sold millions of copies. He, along with his predecessors Swiss author Erich von Danniken and Russian author Immanuel Velikovsky, formed the triumvirate of psuedo-historians who believe that ancient texts are not merely mythological stories.
All three men believed that ancient Babylonian texts, among others, are scientific journals. Rather than see the Anunnaki as mythical gods from the sky, these three men heartily believed that the Anunnaki were aliens. Humans, therefore, were made to serve alien masters who needed the Earth’s mineral wealth to sustain their civilization.
Mainstream academics and historians, without fail, resoundingly reject the notions made by Sitchin and his colleagues. The ancient Babylonian stories are just that: stories written by ancient peoples who were trying to explain their world in ways that made sense to them. Modern science and collective human knowledge have advanced since then to explain floods, astronomy, animals, and a host of other concepts that were, at one time, deemed the works of supernatural gods.
There is no doubt of one thing: ancient Babylonians were more advanced that modern humans give them credit for. A clay tablet translated in 2015 shows that astronomers made extremely accurate mathematical calculations for the orbit of Jupiter a full 1,400 years before Europeans did. Babylonians also may have created trigonometry 1,000 years before the ancient Greeks.
Does this mean ancient Sumerians had alien visitors who taught them advanced science and math? Did old civilizations have access to high-powered computers or technological tools that let them make complex calculations?
Ancient alien theorists think so.
Historians would say ancient humans had plenty of time to make mathematical calculations and figure out their world. Mathematicians lived in largely agrarian societies that waited for plants to grow and rain to fall. At night, they would take detailed observations of the sky to predict when the rainy season would start.
Ponder this for one moment. Why did ancient cultures obsess over gold? Egyptians adorned their pyramids with gold and buried their kings with gold. Egyptians believed the skin of their gods was made of gold.
Gold remains a useful mineral in contemporary society. Gold has a vital purpose in electronics because it conducts electricity very well. Despite this technological attribute, as much as 78 percent of gold goes into jewelry. It’s also a valuable metal in terms of a financial investment.
But why is gold so valuable as a decoration or a precious metal? Gold is rare compared to copper, silver, and iron. That could explain gold as a status symbol among ancient societies.
Ancient people would not have known of gold’s electrical properties. Did the Anunnaki tell them that gold was extremely valuable? Did the “sky gods” needed the metal to provide power for their technology?
That’s for you to decide.
No one knows what the ancient Sumerians were thinking when they wrote about the Anunnaki. Historians denounce ancient alien theorists. Ancient alien theorists believe that there’s no way long-lost human civilizations could have known about complex math without help from more advanced beings.
The lingering questions and mysteries about the Anunnaki may have nothing to do with aliens, but rather a lack of information about ancient cultures. What little we know of Sumeria comes from clay tablets written in an ancient language that no one speaks today. In order to know more, archaeologists must find more writings from that time period.
