Anunnaki: Who Were the Great Gods of Sumer?

The great gods of Sumer and Babylon, whose name means something like 'offspring of An', the sky god. They also became judges of the dead.

The Anunnaki are a group of Mesopotamian gods named in Sumerian and Akkadian texts for over two thousand years. Their name is usually understood as "offspring of An," the sky god. No cuneiform text calls them astronauts.

The Anunnaki are a group of Mesopotamian gods, named in Sumerian and Akkadian texts for more than two thousand years. The Sumerian form is a-nun-na, usually understood as 'offspring of An' or 'princely seed', An being the god of the sky. In the oldest texts the word simply marks the senior gods, the ones who meet in assembly and decide the fates of cities and kings.

Their role shifts over time. In the Old Babylonian flood epic Atrahasis, the Anunnaki are the great gods who rule, while the Igigi, the junior gods, do the heavy labor. In Inanna's Descent to the Nether World, the Anunnaki sit as seven judges in the underworld and fix on the goddess 'the look of death'. In the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, Marduk divides them, stationing three hundred in heaven and three hundred on earth.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, when the flood begins, 'the Anunnaki lift up their torches' and set the land ablaze, and the gods themselves cower in fear of the storm they started. That image, gods holding fire over a drowning world, is one of the most quoted lines in modern writing about them.

The Anunnaki became famous outside scholarship through Zecharia Sitchin, who claimed from 1976 onward that they were astronauts from a planet called Nibiru who created humans as gold-mining slaves. No cuneiform text says this. The real texts do describe gods who labor, strike, hold councils, and make humans to do their work, which is strange enough on its own terms.