Anunnaki
By Sollog aka Dr. Sol Adoni
Anunnaki is an alleged Sumerian studies word or term that has caused much confusion amongst people interested in works such as Zecharia Sitchin’s translations of ancient Sumer texts1) as well as the ancient astronaut theories of Erich von Daniken2) .
The so-called Creation Tablets of Sumeria were discovered in the middle 1800’s and date to a late period in BABYLON around 650 B.C.E. and have nothing to do with real Sumerian religion which would be over 3,000 years older.
The British Museum has a collection of the main tablets referred to by E.A. Wallis Budge in his 1921 short 36 page work on the subject titled The Babylonian Legends of The Creation. The University of Georgia has a PDF of the work3) of which you can find copies of it that are from the Gutenberg Project as well4) .
So the popular Anunnaki appearance in so-called Sumerian literature is not Sumerian at all, it was from later Babylonian literature thousands of years after Sumeria existed and it came from a time when the Hebrews or Jews were supposedly in Babylonian exile.
Here is the first paragraph from Budges book verbatim:
DISCOVERY OF THE TABLETS
THE baked clay tablets and portions of tablets which describe
the views and beliefs of the Babylonians and Assyrians about
the Creation were discovered by Mr. (later Sir) A. H. Layard,
Hormuzd Rassam and George Smith, Assistant in the Depart
ment of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum. They
were found among the ruins of the Palace and Library of
Ashur-bani-pal (B.C. 668-626) at Kuyunjik (Nineveh), between
the years 1866 and 1870, the great ” find” of tablets and fragments, some 20,000 in number, which Rassam made in 1852, was worked through by George Smith, who identified many of the historical inscriptions of Shalmaneser II, Tiglath-Pileser III, Sargon II, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and other kings mentioned in the Bible, and several literary compositions of a legendary character, fables,
etc. In the course of this work he discovered fragments of
various versions of the Babylonian Legend of the Deluge,
and portions of several texts belonging to a work which treated
of the beginning of things, and of the Creation.
Budge was a major academic scholar in ancient languages and his Hieroglyph dictionaries on Egyptology are well recognized works. He authored a myriad of books on ancient cultures especially Egypt5) .
While my own work on Sumerian texts and its language has focused on the Emesal dialect of the Priestesses used in ancient Temples in Sumer, since I found Emesal words to be the main language used in the Torah or Books of Moses in the Old Testament, in which I explained in my book Origin of God6) , that the Torah is not Hebrew at all, it’s a simple phonetic short hand of Emesal Poetry similar to The Book of the Dead poetry from Egypt that was written in Sumerian Emesal millennia before the Egyptians copied it into their own Book of the Dead that most know today. The Torah used ancient Hebrew characters with no vowel points as they were not invented until more modern times circa 100 A.D. to justify the Hellenized Hebrew mistranslations of the Torah into modern Biblical Hebrew to forcibly make the ancient texts match the translation into the Greek Septuagint.
While I am very busy with many non-profit projects and technically retired from my business career, I will try to squeeze into my current schedule a new work on ancient Sumerian Religious Texts beyond the scope of what I have already covered in my work known as Origin of God7) .
So consider this post which was written to become part of the Paideias Knowledge or Encyclopedia Project8) on the Sumerian word Anunnaki, to also be a future chapter in my future book or work on Sumerian Religious Texts.
While ‘recent modern’ academic sources are crediting the etymological understanding of the word Anunnaki to recent works such as those sourced at University of Penn’s online reference database to mid 1960’s work9) , the fact is Budge referenced Anunnaki to mean the gods in his 1921 work on the Creation Legends of Babylon10) 11) . It is my own scholarly opinion that most of the works translating Babylonian texts that most Sitchin and Von Daniken fans of the Anunnaki call Sumerian, are prejudiced to force upon them religious meanings to show a source material to justify creation mythos of later civilization. It may be real Sumerian texts are more scientific than religious, if the root words are properly used to translate such texts.
In a recent Sumerian Lexicon by Dr. Halloran12) the etymology of A-NUN-NA (k) is given as master (noble) offspring or noble stock, with (d)A-NUN-NA(k) as the gods as a whole or the gods of the netherworld.
The academic smearing of Zecharia Sitchin by Dr. Heiser is very clear since he operates Sitchin is Wrong .com 13) . While I generally agree with Dr. Heiser on his interpretation of the so-called VA 243 Seal 14) that the 12 planet theory of Sitchin is wishful thinking. Yet the fact is the Anunnaki are considered to be a valid reference to the gods as many so-called Sumerian scholars have defined the word A-NUN-NA to mean, such as in the recent Sumerian Lexicon by Dr. Halloran15) and as early as the work by Budge aforementioned in his 1921 work on the Creation Legends of Babylon16) 17) .
My own literal Sumerian translation of the root of the Sumerian word A-NUN-NA commonly transliterated incorrectly as Anunnaki would be based on:
A – The or father or semen or flood or tears18)
NUN – Great or Prince or noble19)
NA – Human being, advice, place or stone20) . In a suffix position which is the usual position in the ancient Sumerian texts, it is possessive for his or hers.
Ke4 – Suffix meaning of21)
Hence A-NUN-NA would mean either;
His/Hers noble/great father.
The father (semen) of great (noble) men
The place of the great flood
Or perhaps, the great stone (a common myth in ancient times that a rock or dry land was the pillar of creation.
General consensus about this term by most in the Sumerian etymological world of academia is wrong and it parallels the definition put forth in the Sumerian Lexicon by Dr. Halloran22) . That definition is ‘the great gods’.
There is absolutely no reference in Anunnaki to the main Sumerian word(s) for GOD in this logogram. Also, you can see the way the study of Semitic words have corrupted the academia of Sumer study by the use of ‘offspring’ all of a sudden appearing in this logogram in Dr. Halloran’s Lexicon. The reason is, that is the accepted definition TODAY for Nun in Hebrew. As I pointed out in my book Origin of God23) many words in Hebrew are not translated right, they’re best guesses, such as the word Hebrew itself. A modern Rabbi will admit modern Jews who are totally influenced by ancient Greece’s impact on the religion (example synagogue where they meet is Greek not Hebrew for Temple, etc) that they don’t know what Hebrew means, it means maybe ‘over there’ or ‘across the river’.
As I pointed out in Origin of God24) the modern word Hebrew has a Hellenized ‘H’ where a Sumer ‘E’ should have been correctly transliterated. Hebrew is actually E-BRI, which in Sumerian meant TEMPLE OF CIRCUMCISION, which is exactly what the whole story of Abraham is about, the law of circumcision. If you properly translate the Torah, which modern Jews cannot do due to the root of modern Judaism being 100% influenced by the Greek Septuagint, only then do you understand how words such as Hebrew (e-Bri) and Nun are Sumerian.
Yet, in the later 18th Century when most of this Sumerian translation was going on in academia of actually Babylonian tablets, is when you had scholars mistranslating logograms such as A-NUN-NA into some mistranslation about great gods. There is no Sumerian god root word at all in this logogram and only a few usages in Sumer texts attach a possible second word next to it to possibly make the word appear to be referencing a group of great gods as Budge incorrectly translated the phrase.
The same scholars that mistranslated A-NUN-NA into some kind of god reference, which is not 100% based on my understanding of Sumeria and its languages and the real Sumer words for god and gods, which is never A-NUN-NA. These same Orientalists that bastardized this logogram by matching it with the Hebrew Nun for offspring in later times. NU-UN is probably the long root of NUN in Sumerian, which is most likely a compressed form of NU-UN(NUN), and it would mean literally a great people or large crowd. NU is either an image or a crowd or people and UN is tall or great.
This is perhaps where the idea of giant men come into play in he whole issue of the A-NUN-NA-K. A real stretch would be to say it meant the father of tall men, or the sperm of tall men. It has more to do with perhaps a noble class of men, sperm/father/waters are the usual way you translate the word represented by the letter ‘A’ in Sumerian.
Nun is usually noble or great, although NU-UN its ancient root many mean great men, great people, large crowd or tall men.
NA is human beings or a place or a rock.
Now where in the texts do you see any root words relating to a Sumerian god or gods? No where in the texts does it exist.
Perhaps it may have meant a ruling class, a noble stock, etc. But it is not gods.
Both Judaism and Islam share the ancient root word for GOD from Sumeria which is AL2, which is the AL or EL or Hebrew/Judaism spelled Aleph Lamed in Hebrew and AL-LAH the Islam equivalent. Now had the ancient texts used AL2-A-NUN-NA, then the god reference would have been made and the A-NUN-NA would be a class of Sumerian gods.
Instead an occasional alleged ruler suffix rarely attached in Sumerian texts is badly translated in Assyriology to mean a class of gods. Such a translation is WRONG. The over use of god in these alleged Sumerian translations done mostly in the later 1800’s were by academics heavily prejudiced by being Christian, who studied Semitic languages to support the bad translations of the Greek Septuagint, who also had classical training in Greek, Latin and some had training in Egyptology as well. So the pantheons of gods of both Greece and Egypt corrupted the way these early Babylonian/Sumerian academics viewed these words and they impressed upon phrases such as A-NUN-NA a reference to gods where none exists.
The truth about Sumerian religion is that it was well defined as to a god of gods, who had a queen and they ruled a small class of lesser gods usually personified by planets with the main gods of light of course being the sun and moon gods who both had wives. So the A-NUN-NA have no place in a legitimate Sumerian pantheon of elite gods in early Sumerian creation mythos which had gods of nature being air/water/underworld/etc as well as gods of light and the lights were planets and the moon and the sun. The A-NUN-NA actually appear in much later creation mythos from Babylon in works such as the Bilingual Creation Legends attributed to being translated by Budge that mention Babylon being created, which means the holy grail of Budge was Babylonian and not even a real Sumerian creation story. Babylon was built upon the ancient ashes of Sumeria, by then you have Marduk as the god of gods and you have A-NUN-NA being mentioned. But the most ancient stories are void of any deities named A-NUN-NA. There is no Marduk in Sumerian creation mythos, that is thousands of years later and from Babylon and by then Marduk was also known as the Bel of the Old Testament or Bal.
My own interests in these ancient texts are based upon a couple of things I am very interested in, such as the origins of the western biblical origin of a single creator god mythos and UFOS as well as lost ancient scientific knowledge about a multi-dimensional aspect to the Universe preserved in ancient creation mythos by advanced lost ancient civilizations.
The concept of nine or ten major gods in ancient times is seen by me to be a way that lost ancient scientific knowledge of a multi-verse or multi-dimensional universe was preserved by lost civilizations.
In my book on multi-dimensional computers, a future computer technology that will soon exist, titled Hologram Universe25) I theorize the actual computer technology and programming language that will soon be reality. This new age of super multi-dimensional computers will create six, nine and even ten dimensional virtual computer worlds or universes, so the ether of such technological universes may be nothing more than ancient scientific knowledge about how our own Universe came to be.
While the so-called ‘ancient astronaut’ theory is very popular due to the work of both Von Daniken and Sitchin, the way such authors shoe-horned ancient texts to justify their own prejudiced beliefs upon topics such as ancient monuments and UFOS in images from ancient times is easily understood by a trained scholar in ancient texts. The whole ancient astronaut theory assumes that such technology was extraterrestrial. Had they assumed it was perhaps also a lost ancient civilization, I would be more open to support their theories.
While I do agree with ancient astronaut theory that many images of potential UFOS or to me perhaps lost ancient technology does exist such as the unexplainable carving of possible UFOS and modern technology such as a helicopter and or a dirigible (blimp) or submarine in the Abydos tomb in Egypt I mentioned in my own book on UFOS titles UFOS THE PROOF26) .
Abydos Helicopter and UFO Carving from Ancient Egypt
However, if these images are ancient lost technology or proof of extraterrestrial visitation or even multi-dimensional visitation, is open to debate. What is known is there are many modern instances of UFOS still being reported, photographed and videotaped around the world. Are these really extraterrestrial or perhaps they are members of a lost civilization that still exists upon the earth that is hiding from modern man?
These UFOS may even be temporal visitations from other dimensions in our own multi-verse universe. What is known, is that this general phenomena referred to as UFOS is still UNKNOWN, that is why they are all generalized as to be Unknown Flying Objects or UFOS. Such phenomena is recorded in ancient texts and images be it cave or rock paintings or carvings and ancient flying craft is recorded in most if not all ancient religious texts.
What is clear in studying ancient texts and monuments is that our modern version of ‘history’ cannot justify the amazing ancient monuments of ancient civilizations to the alleged technology these great civilizations used. In modern times (the past 50 or so years), new archaeological finds have shown our academic version of ‘history’ is incorrect. Ancient temples and even larger pyramids than the great pyramid of Giza have been found and they do not fit into our modern version of ‘history’. Such discoveries are what the so-called world of academia likes to label as pseudo-archaeology or pseudo-science.
The find of an apparent ancient temple BURIED intentionally at Göbekli Tepe for instance, is a well-made complex of structures that pre-date even Sumeria by many millennia, from a time when ‘man’ was still thought to be basically in a hunter-gathering stage of development.
The huge Bosnian Pyramid recently discovered has proven to be emitting an unknown energy beam that defies modern science since the energy stream gets stronger above the source of the energy below the pyramid structure. Our modern understanding of how a possible crystalline energy source combined with underground streams of water would emit an energy source that should weaken as the energy beam gets further away from the underground source, yet studies have shown the energy emission is growing with intensity as it gets further away from the source below the pyramid structures.
Academic prejudices are rampant since the subject of lost civilizations and lost ancient technology is not considered a serious topic of discussion amongst many scholars due to the prejudicial dogma of knowledge they were born into and educated by.
While I applaud the creative minds of authors such as Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin, their work is often based upon having to have extraterrestrial origins to justify ancient technology and ancient monuments instead of lost ancient civilizations or even multi-verse visitations.
What is clear now is that ancient civilizations existed well before Sumeria and the knowledge about these civilizations was lost as was their technology.
Did such civilizations exist upon the earth tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and did any of these ‘beings’ perhaps leave the earth to travel the stars and have they traveled back to their ‘home’ (earth) only to find their civilizations are long gone and perhaps they now hide out in ancient underground systems or in bases at the depths of the oceans that they built millennia ago and now use to hide from ‘modern man’?
There’s a popular place in modern culture for the works of authors such as Erich Von Daniken and Zecharia Sitchin. I don’t like the academic attacks upon either author, since much of it is clearly due to prejudiced academic hubris.
Modern science has recently verified27) 28) that lost technology that was very simple such as using liquids to help move large blocks was in fact used in ancient Egypt as accurately depicted in tomb paintings. It was a real ancient ‘scientific’ way to make moving large stones easier than modern science understood for centuries as to how large objects were moved by the ancients.