Anunnaki

Anunna, or Anunnaki in its Akkadian form, is not a name but a collective. In Sumerian it is written a-nun-na, usually understood as the offspring or the seed of An, the sky god, and in the earliest usage it means simply the great gods taken together: the assembly that meets, deliberates and fixes destinies. When a Sumerian text wants to say that a decision was final, it says the Anunna made it.

The term is often paired with a second one, the Igigi, and that pairing is where most of the confusion begins. In the Old Babylonian poem Atrahasis the Igigi are the junior gods who dig the canals and carry the baskets, who throw down their tools in protest at the work, and whose strike is settled by the making of human beings to do it instead; the Anunnaki are the senior gods for whom the work is done. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk divides the Anunnaki after his victory, assigning three hundred to the heavens and three hundred to the earth, and they build Babylon for him in return.

By the later Akkadian period the sense has narrowed, and in places inverted. The Anunnaki become gods of the underworld, and the Igigi the gods of heaven. That is the sense governing the descent of Inanna, where the goddess is brought before the seven Anunna, the judges of the great below, who fix her with the eye of death. A reader meeting the word in two texts a thousand years apart is not meeting a contradiction so much as a term that moved with the theology around it.

Outside Assyriology the word Anunnaki is now better known from a modern claim than from the tablets. In The 12th Planet, published in 1976, Zecharia Sitchin argued that the Anunnaki were flesh-and-blood visitors from a planet he called Nibiru, on a long elliptical orbit, who came to Earth for gold and produced human beings as a labour force by altering an existing primate. The book and its sequels sold widely, were followed by television treatments, and the idea is now a fixture of a large ancient-astronaut literature and of much online religious speculation. It is a genuine modern belief with genuine adherents, and it is set down here as one.

Assyriologists do not accept it, and the disagreement is not about interpretation but about the readings the argument rests on. Nibiru is a real cuneiform word, but in the astronomical texts it denotes a crossing or a ferry point in the sky, applied most often to Jupiter, rather than a distant planet on a long orbit. The Anunnaki, in every text that names them, are gods: addressed in cult, seated in an assembly, fixing destinies. The making of humanity to relieve the gods of labour is a real Mesopotamian motif, and Atrahasis states it plainly, but it is stated as an act of divine making from clay and the blood of a slain god, not as an operation performed on an existing species.

Michael S. Heiser, a scholar of Hebrew Bible and Semitic languages, published detailed rebuttals of Sitchin's philology, concentrating on the cylinder seal VA 243 in Berlin, which Sitchin read as a diagram of the solar system carrying one planet more than we know. The disc at the top of that seal is a star rosette of the kind used across Mesopotamian art as a divine emblem, and the objects set around it are neither to scale nor in orbital order.