The Anunnaki — The Old Gods

This chapter, The Anunnaki, encompasses a great deal more than a description of gods from ancient texts. This is an in-depth exploration of the myths, legends, and traditions found within greater Sumerian religion in particular. Within which are a number of crucial (and fascinating) details that may shed light on certain prehistoric mysteries.

The Anunnaki are the gods — including the main pantheon, the most important deities — of a religion that lasted more than 3000 years, and has influenced billions of people around the world. ‘Anunnaki’ is the name given to the Old Gods by the Akkadians, which they were known as by the Babylonians and Assyrians after about 1800 BCE until the final centuries of the old age. Even today they are best known by this name — Anunnaki — because of its use in modern culture.

However, this is not their only name, nor their oldest. Their first name was the Anuna, given to them by the Sumerians.

Introduction

The Anunnaki and the Lost Story

We begin our search for the Lost Story of Humanity in Sumer. I chose this region, peoples, and nation as the starting point — situated in the ancestral land of both Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent — for a number of reasons. The Sumerians wrote the oldest traditions extent in the entire world, which laid the foundations of a tradition that dominated the Near East for 3000 years.

These traditions had a significant impact on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the very basis of the traditions of Abrahamic Religion.

It is an irreducible fact that human history began in Sumer. The Sumeriansinvented writing. They impressed wet clay with a stylus made of the cut tip of a reed, creating slash-shaped impressions. The skill was mostly used for book-keeping, buying and selling, in the mercantile business — which itself suggests a vast trade network that the Sumerians were at the heart of. The Ancient Egyptians, their neighbours to the southeast, followed suit shortly after.

They left extensive records from about 3000 BCE onwards which (partly due to the Mesopotamian tradition of reading, writing, scholarship, and scribal art founded by the Sumerians, and partly due to sheer, dumb luck) have given us today a very keen, accurate insight into the daily lives of a Sumerian person.

They were the first historical people in the world. so the scribes trained in the edubba (school), went off to work in all sorts of professions.

containing everything from records of their daily lives, administrative tablets, records of grain shipments, reciepts and royal corrospondence (while not always riveting) tell us a great deal.

(This is also how we have gotten new evidence relating to the Great Pyramid, after all these years. Whether it is conclusive or not…)

to sophisticated poems, epics, narratives, and accounts of the gods (many of which would have had an oral, performative aspect for ceremonies, festivals, and perhaps entertainment).

Within the extensive records of this ancient people that contain legendary accounts that many dismiss as myth, and with the great gods of the Sumerians: the beings that the Sumerians called the Anuna, who were later known by their Semitic Akkadian name, the Anunnaki.

The Anunnaki are a group of beings that exist within Sumerian Religion at the dawn of recorded history. When mankind first learned how to write, when the Sumerians and the Egyptians invented this skill, the gods were already in existence. The names of the highest Anunnaki are documented among the first concepts ever recorded in writing in human history, although it wouldn’t be until centuries later that we begin to get the full story, the ancient tales of gods, heroes, and man.

A Rich Tapestry of Religious Tradition

In this chapter we will be dealing with the Anuna, the “great gods” of the Sumerians in extensive detail, exactly as the Sumerian stories originally described them. I take no creative license in this description, drawing only from the words that the Sumerians themselves recorded by their own hand and preserved over the last 4000 and more years in the baked clay tablets that held their language.

For one, if we desire truth, we cannot deviate from the facts — which in this case are the original Sumerian traditions. Too often have I seen claims made about the Anunnaki that I have not been able to find anywhere in the ancient Sumerian records, and I have read nearly all of the relevant and translated texts.

Second, if we desire truth in these ancient matters, we have to be specific. The depiction of the Anunnaki changed over the thousands of years of diverse cultures that held the Anuna at the very heart of their religious and mythological traditions. Literally dozens of distinct cultures within the Near East alone, revered the Anuna in some form.

The Sumerians and the Akkadians were the first and the oldest. The revolutionary inventors of urban civilization — apparently the Sumerians specifically, at least at first, according to what we know. They were followed by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Hurrians, Amorites, Canannites, Jews, and Phoenicians all of whom were the religious and cultural descendents of the Sumerians, and Sumerian Religion.

The variations of these religious beliefs stretch across more than 2000 years — in excess of four millennia if we include the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (who together comprise the Abrahamic religions) — all important parts of this rich religious tapestry. We have to include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam within this long history because there is a direct, definitive link between the Anunnaki and Elohim, the Elohim being the Hebrew word that is translated as “angel” in Christianity and Islam.

They were originally known by their Sumerian name Anuna, yet only a few hundred years later during Babylonian period in the same region, the name Anunnaki became the common term. Throughout the intervening centuries we see dozens of unique interpretations of the original Sumerian gods which reach their enduring form as the Elohim of both the Canaanite religion and the Hebrew Bible of the children of Judah — becoming the angels of Christianity and Islam.

The Sumerian Anuna In The Traditions of Mesopotamian Religion

In order to understand the Anunnaki I believe the principal focus should be on the Sumerian traditions. In addition to the reason I stated above (that the Sumerian traditions are the oldest recorded version of what is a far more ancient account, therefore the most closely aligned with the original form) we also have the ubiquitous motif of dealing with antediluvian times — events before the great flood.

In other words, before the meltdown of the last Ice Age. However, given the intervening thousands of years between the close of the Younger Dryas (around 9700 BCE) and the dawn of human history in Sumer (around 3000 BCE), we have to assume a degree of error that crept into even these traditions, even though the Sumerian versions are the closest to the source.

Yet at the same time as in this case “oldest is best” to some degree, a contextual understanding is also important. A greater degree of clarity on the Anunnaki might perhaps be attained through an examination of the dozens of later traditions recorded over the ensuing millennia, if we keep our roots firmly grounded in the original Sumerian mythology as to not overcommit to details in later traditions that might very well be fictitious. We can see the evolution of the traditions over time through ancient history, transforming in certain ways as time moves forwards, and with each successive culture that preserves them.

On the one hand, this evolution is almost certainly going to be, in large part, an act of fictionalization. Yet it is my belief that we should cautiously keep our minds open (though guardedly) to the possibility that not all of the details of later traditions that diverge from the Sumerian traditions, or were not present in the Sumerian traditions, were invented.

The most realistic and logical argument for this fact is that the people of Mesopotamia and the Near East from the days of Sumer had an advanced, thorough, and deeply ingrained scribal practice. Generations upon generations of scribes copied and recopied the ancient texts in the same language for thousands of years. At their time (before the destruction of their ancient civilization) they had access to extensive libraries filled with texts their scholars could read and use as reference, only a fragment of which remain today.

A late Mesopotamian King, I believe it was Ashurbanipal, in one inscription bragged…

“I can read Sumerian…”

Ashurbanipal lived [blank] and could read the Sumerian texts from [blank], a full [blank] years apart from one another. This is the same insight that a modern scholar is gifted being able to read the Illiad, Odyssey, the Old Testament, or . All of which preserve a pciture of the time they were written almost as good as a video recording could have. (God what I would give for a video recording of ancient Uruk, Babylon, Abydos, Giza, or Athens.) Indeed, the world forgot completely about these ancient peoples and these ancient languages for literally around 2000 years. It wasn’t until the 1800s that we recovered the ancient clay tablets, and generations more until their script was decoded, and the knowledge unveiled to us to illuminate the past.

In light of this I believe strongly that it is important to remember the ancients had greater access to ancient knowledge than we do. So many texts from the Classical period are known to us only from their references in the works of Greek and Roman authors. These are tantalizing treasures to us modern historians, dreams that can never truly be fulfilled, a thirst that can never be fully quenched, because these texts are almost certainly lost to time. It is inevitable that this happened in Mesopotamia too, in the ages long before the birth of Rome. While the fire-baked clay tablets they used were more durable, three-thousand years is a long time. While age will not break down clay alone, the destruction of war, flooding, abandonment to the elements when settlements were abandoned could have all led to their destruction. Therefore it remains a distinct possibility that variants in tradition within the coherent ancient Near Eastern religion could be evidence of access to knowledge preserved by that specific culture that was lost to others. Their culture was still thriving as it had done for thousands of years, so in many ways, they would know better. Even though we can see now the extensive evolution of ancient Sumerian traditions into many distinct forms and sects, the heart remains the same, more or less.

Over the course of this chapter we will be covering all of the gods of Mesopotamian traditions as a singular unit. While this part is appropriately named The Anunnaki, that term has a greater and more extensive meaning than most are fully cognizant of. We will go through nearly all of the major Mesopotamian traditions out of necessity, since the Anunnaki appear in all of them, all of the Near Eastern traditions in fact, which is a more appropriate designation, in some form or another. In the end, we will also touch on their appearance in the many proximal traditions outside of the Near East in Europe and in India.

Supernatural Gods, Aliens, Kings, Ancestors, or Fiction?

As this is the opening chapter of this book, I want to touch on an important point: what is my belief on the identity of the Sumerian gods?

So much is written about the Anunnaki in popular culture. Zechariah Sitchen (and other authors) are adamant that the Anunnaki are aliens. Mainstream scholarship staunchly opposes that view with the polar opposite perspective, that Sumerian myth and legend is pure myth — fantasy. Graham Hancock takes a middle path, suggesting that these myths refer to an advanced Ice Age civilization at a level of technology equatable to that of the much later Bronze Age.

I don’t have an opinion, and choose not to speculate. This book is a collection of hard facts, with some analysis which might border on speculation. First, I don’t believe is supernatural beings. Period. If there is such a thing, then they would be extra-terrestrials (aliens) or, possibly, multidimensional beings. (Physics says there are many dimension of reality, thus perhaps there are beings in those other dimensions.)

Yet with that being said, I am not a zealous believer in Ancient Aliens either. I absolutely believe in the possibility of aliens. Contact between such a species and prehistoric humanity is a fascinating possibility. Yet aside from mythical accounts, there is almost no hard evidence for such contact or visitation.

If I had to lean in any direction, I would lean towards Graham Hancock’s interpretation. It seems to me that the academic dismissal of historicity encoded in ancient myth is both misguided and short-sighted — and flat-out incorrect (as I will illustrate throughout this book).

The only conclusion that I can definitely verify is that there is ample evidence for an advanced — but lost — Ice Age civilization. A civilization that possessed advanced knowledge for their time, i.e. social structure, agriculture, and building technology a few millennia ahead of its time. Perhaps approaching a level that we see during the Uruk Period and Dynastic Egypt and Sumer.

It is my belief that the traditions of Sumerian Religion (Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Greek, Vedic, and Zoroastrian religions as well, as you will see) document events in the millennia preceding the dawn of history c.3000 BCE, extending into the last Ice Age around (and before) 10,000 BCE.

I believe that an ancestor people is remembered, and were deified, in these ancient religions, and that they all trace back to the same source. In my opinion, it is likely that they were the unquestionable great savants responsible for the Neolithic Revolution. We do not need aliens to explain the vast majority of the facts.

Yet if future scholarship proves their existence, so be it. (I would not be surprised because there are certain anomalies.) It’s just that I don’t like the idea of defaulting in that direction without evidence. In the same way as I am against saying that because we don’t know how the universe emerged, that it was God.

There are real mysteries in the facts themselves, which is where my interest resides. There is wonder enough in the story, without needing to bring gods, angels, demons, and ET into the equation.

• Chapter II — The Old Gods
• The Lost Story of Humanity