The Anunnaki, the gods of ancient Sumer

The name Anunnaki means, roughly, the offspring of An, the sky. In the myths they are the leading gods, gathered as a divine assembly that debates and decrees, much as a council of city elders might.

At its head stood An, the distant sky-father; Enlil, lord of wind and command; and Enki (later Ea), the clever god of fresh water, craft, and wisdom. Around them moved Inanna, goddess of love and war, the moon-god Nanna, the sun-god Utu, and many more. These were not remote abstractions. Each had a home city, a temple, a household, and a personality, with all the pride and quarrels that implies.

The Mesopotamians pictured their gods as powerful, immortal versions of themselves. In myth the gods even created humankind for a very practical reason: they were tired of doing their own labour, and made people to tend the fields and feed them through the temples.

We see the Anunnaki in the art the ancients actually made: small votive statues with clasped hands and wide inlaid eyes, and cylinder seals showing worshippers led before an enthroned deity. In some stories the Anunnaki are also the judges of the underworld, weighing the dead. This is a religion of clay, reed, and river, not of the stars.

In the twentieth century the Anunnaki were pulled out of Sumer and into something else entirely. Popular writers, most famously Zecharia Sitchin, claimed they were astronauts from a hidden planet who engineered humanity. It is a striking story. It is not what the tablets say.

No Sumerian text describes spaceships or a planet called Nibiru in the way these theories claim, and specialists in the language reject the readings the theories depend on. The real Anunnaki are more interesting than the myth about the myth: gods imagined by the first city-dwellers to explain a world of flood and harvest, kingship and death. We tell their story straight, with respect for the people who first told it.