History
The Anunnaki, the gods of ancient Sumer
Long before they became a fixture of late-night television, the Anunnaki were the great gods of Sumer: the divine family that the first cities prayed to, feared, and carved into stone. Here is who they actually were.
The Anunnaki are among the oldest named gods in human history. In the beliefs of Sumer and the wider Mesopotamian world, they were the assembly of great deities who governed the cosmos, decreed fates, and judged the dead. Their story is stranger, older, and far more human than the modern myth that grew around them.
The assembly of the gods
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.
How myth pictured them
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.
From clay to conspiracy
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.
The Anunnaki in the Chronicle
Chronicles of Uruk takes the Anunnaki seriously as myth, the way the ancients remembered them, not as machinery from the sky. What that memory holds, and what it hides, is for you to discover in the story.
The adventure is invented. The gods, their assembly, and the people who worshipped them are real history, and we keep them that way.
Common questions
- Were the Anunnaki aliens?
- No. In the actual Sumerian and Mesopotamian sources the Anunnaki are gods, not extraterrestrials. The ancient-astronaut idea comes from twentieth-century popular writing, not from the tablets, and scholars of the language do not support it.
- Who was the most important Anunnaki god?
- It shifted over time. An, the sky, was the eldest and most remote; Enlil held real authority over gods and kings; and Enki, god of wisdom and fresh water, is the friend of humanity in many myths. Inanna, later Ishtar, may be the most vivid of all.
- Are the Anunnaki the same as the Igigi?
- Not quite. Some texts distinguish the Anunnaki, the great ruling gods, from the Igigi, a class of younger gods who did the labour, and who in one famous myth go on strike, prompting the gods to create humans in their place. The usage is not always consistent across the sources.
Keep reading
Uruk, the first great city
The Sumerian city that gave an age its name, home to the world's earliest writing and the king who became its oldest legend.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Humanity's oldest surviving story: a restless king, a wild man made to match him, and a journey to the edge of death.
Inanna, queen of heaven
The goddess of love and war whose eight-pointed star became our mark, and the oldest story of a god who dies and returns.
Cuneiform, the first writing
How marks pressed into wet clay five thousand years ago became the first writing, and what the tablets still say to us.
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