The Anunnaki, The Old Gods

The Anunnaki are the celestial beings of the Sumerians. Great beings said to have descended from heaven to Earth in the distant past, long before they created the first humans, fashioned to serve the gods.

A fraction of the Anunnaki were explicitly said to have descended to Earth, where they remained, living alongside peoples like the Sumerians. Their homes are directly referenced in ancient records — homes in addition to the Sumerian temples, which were also considered the home of the gods, each temple built for a different deity. Indeed the “abodes of the gods” are referenced so many times as literal locations somewhere on the periphery of the nation of Sumer, to the point where we need to consider the possibility that they are real sites known to the ancients. Which forces us also to reconsider what — or whom — the Sumerians where actually referring to when speaking of the Anunnaki.

The Anunnaki, An Introduction to the Old Gods

Half of the Anunnaki were said to have remained in heaven, never to descend. Of those who came down, some were considered teachers of humanity, credited with instructing man on music, writing, agriculture, building, kingship, the ordering of the state and the making of laws. According to the Sumerians the Anunaku ruled until they passed the divine right of kingship to the young species of their creation, humanity.

Most scholars dismiss the religions of the ancients as pure myth. Nothing but the fantasy of primitive minds attempting to intellectually order their world into understanding. This is definitively true in part. There are a number of comically ridiculous beliefs of the ancient Mesopotamian people, contradicted by astoundingly sound, technical, advanced thinking (mathematics, geometry, a writing system, advanced architecture, astronomy and an early form of calculus, for example) that exist paradoxically alongside their primitive ideas. It really is a wonder to observe.

This paradox has existed at all stages of human history, and in itself means nothing. In the case of the people of Sumer and Akkad, it only illustrates that clear, advanced, and logical thinking was attained in spades, and existed alongside primitive, superstitious thought. I believe we can forgive them for this, considering the revolutions they did accomplish, and their general antiquity. Especially considering that at the dawn of the 20th century Einstein was laying the foundations for Relativity that would revolutionize science, leading to black holes, time dilation, spacetime, time travel, atomic weapons, and the quantum realm, while many people still believed that the surface of the Sun was populated. Not unlike the 1960s when mankind broke the Earth’s atmosphere to set foot on the Moon, while on the surface of the Earth, people still had yet to reconcile the genetic equality of races. Or today, with all of our modern technological wonders, the ability to circumnavigate the globe with ease, communicate with pocket-held devices to anyone anywhere, peer through time to distant galaxies light-years beyond our own, and yet many have not yet learned to read the stars and so persist in the belief that the Earth is flat.

This type of cultural paradox is apparently the story of our species.

The dismissal of ancient myth entirely as fiction is an ironic stance in the specific case where those scholars denouncing ancient tradition are religious themselves, as some of the core tenets in the great religions today are remnants of the Sumero-Akkadian religious system, as we will see.

Nonetheless, scholars had excellent reasons to do so. There was little evidence to the contrary. Yet through a thorough study of ancient myth and religious tradition there is now enough textual, archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and anthropological evidence to suggest a more complex story to the emergence of these ancient legends. On this evidence there are a few strong, alternative interpretations arising naturally that indicate a degree of historicity. Rather than dismissing ancient accounts as pure fantasy — from a people we all agree were literally revolutionary, innovate, and creative with considerable sophistication — perhaps there is a new consensus that the evidence is directing us to.

The Anuna — as the Sumerians called them — were the bedrock of religion through the ancient Middle East in all three thousand years of recorded ancient history. (In some senses, the Anuna have been the dominant force in world religion for the entirety of recorded history, 5000 years ago until today.) Their names and stories were among the first words impressed into clay tablets in their unique writing system as soon as they began to apply their newly discovered skill in prose and poetry (outside of the mainly mercantile, administrative, and bureaucratic function it first served for centuries after its invention).

Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that the earliest extant textual references to the gods of Sumer and Akkad have no causal link to their conception, to the age of the ‘religious’ tradition itself. There are certain aspects of myth that we know record historical events dating back at minimum to around 9700 BCE (the end of the final phase at the End of the Last Ice Age). This includes every single ancient reference to the Great Flood in World Mythology. Including the Sumerian account which is the oldest recorded version in the world, upon which the Judaic tale of Noach is based on, which is the source of the modern Christian tale ofNoah. The scientific discovery of the great period of flooding vindicated literally every tradition that held a memory of this event. As the gods are entwined with the Sumerian flood story, and indeed predate it in story by thousands of years with a whole aspect of religious thought explicitly antediluvian, there is every indication and a strong possibility that the tradition of the gods in some form predate that period as well. The Anuna gods and the stories about them were in existence perhaps thousands of years before they used the written word to sing their praises. Their stories persisted throughout all this time, and remain — incredibly, against all odds — in the heart of some of the worlds greatest religions.

While perpetuity of an idea itself is not evidence of its veracity, it certainly confirms the power of that idea, and the impact that it has had on the collective human psyche. It is my belief that there is historical truth in the myths and legends of ancient Sumerian religion. Though to what precise degree, I cannot say. We will have to explore the Sumerian texts themselves in much greater detail, and archaeology too, before we arrive at any conclusions. Yet I believe that we have in the Sumerian legendary and mythical corpus a reflection of a primordial story (found in a number of pivotal cultures and traditions) and it is with this thesis in mind that the spirit of our investigation of the Anunnaki is undertaken.

Table of Contents

• The Origins of the Anunnaku
• Anunnaki — A Tribe of Gods
• The Anunnaki In The Great Religions of the World
• Gods and Angels, Aliens or Man?

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