The Anunnaki gods were worshipped by the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia long before the Greeks praised the Olympian gods or the Egyptians prayed to Osiris.
While Zeus and the rest of the Greek gods resided at the top of Mount Olympus, and Osiris was the god of the earth and the underworld, the Anunnaki were winged deities who lived up in the heavens and came down to Earth to decide on people’s destiny.
The Sumerians had many myths involving the Anunnaki gods passing judgment on humans. The gods were described as children of the Earth and sky. This indicates they were believed to interact with humans when they came down to Earth.
Based on ancient carvings depicting deities of ancient Mesopotamia, some had wings, wore horned caps, and had bird faces, while others held something resembling a modern-day ladies’ purse.
The Anunnaki descended from the god of the heavens An and the goddess of the Earth Ki. The word Anunnaki word can be translated into “princely seed” in Sumerian, but as a term, it remains poorly defined. There is hardly any evidence of an exact number of these gods and their various functions as the historical texts deviate from one another.
According to Sumerian beliefs, the Heaven and Earth were inseparable until Enlil came along. Enlil split the Heaven and Earth in two and carried the Earth away whilst his father, An, carried away the sky.
The advanced Sumerian civilization
In the Sumerian language, Sumer means “land of the kings.” Sumer was located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—hence the Greek name Mesopotamia, meaning Meso (between) potamia (rivers). Its land was in southern Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq. Sumer is one of the oldest civilizations, estimated to have existed between 4500 BC to 1750 BC.
It consisted of a small number of city-states, each organized around a temple now called a ziggurat, dedicated to the Anunnaki gods’ worship. Ziggurats were layered pyramids with a flat top. Archaeologists consider those communities to be “servant-slave” populations dedicated to serving the temple gods. Later, the priesthood rulership was replaced by kings.
The Sumerians pre-existed the Babylonians. In fact, Babylonian cuneiform texts describe the Sumerians as ancients. Despite their ancient origins, the Sumerians had developed a sophisticated method of keeping time, dividing the day into hours, similar to the way we count time today. They also invented cuneiform, one of the earliest known systems of writing in human history. In addition, they invented the plow. This played a great role in helping their empire grow.
The famous Epic of Gilgamesh—the so-called Mesopotamian Odyssey—begins with five short poems in the Sumerian language about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. It is known from tablets that were written during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The poems have been entitled “Gilgamesh and Huwawa,” “Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven,” “Gilgamesh and Agga of Kish,” “Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” and “The Death of Gilgamesh.”
The sophistication of the Sumerians is demonstrated by a clay tablet translated in 2015 showing that ancient astronomers made extremely accurate mathematical calculations for the orbit of Jupiter a full 1,400 years before Europeans did.
Were the Anunnaki mythical gods or something else?
It was exactly these extraordinary advances in Sumerian civilization so early in antiquity that made some researchers doubt Sumerian mythology and extrapolate the so-called ancient astronaut or ancient alien theories about the Anunnaki.
Fringe theorists believe Sumerian deities were aliens from another planet that ruled the Sumerians, sharing their advanced knowledge and intelligence with them.
Researcher and author Michael Cremo (Forbidden Archaeology), Zecharia Sitchin, Erich von Däniken (Chariots of the Gods), author and researcher Michael Tellinger, and several others argue that the Anunnaki were actually aliens posing as gods.
Some of these theories also assert these aliens genetically engineered the human race to be a slave species, influencing human affairs for millennia. These off-world gods brought advanced technologies that account for sophisticated megastructures such as the pyramids or Stonehenge. Tellinger claimed that the Anunnaki extracted massive amounts of gold using human labor and introduced the concepts of money, finance, and debt to human societies.
Most mainstream researchers and historians reject the ideas put forth by Sitchin and his colleagues. They often say these theorists have either mistranslated or misinterpreted the ancient Sumerian texts. For example, Sitchin’s theories that the advanced abilities of the people of Sumer were taught by aliens, quoting the existence of “flying machines” appearing in some ancient Sumerian texts, could be a mistranslation.
Sitchin took it a few leaps further. In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, he claimed that thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia, extraterrestrials intervened genetically to create humans as labor slaves to mine gold for them. They would then take the gold back to their planet. To prove his point, he referred to ancient texts.
Some researchers do point out that ancient Sumerian texts include some unusual-sounding beliefs and descriptions, but they argue that this is mostly because they lived in a time before people had a sophisticated understanding of natural phenomena, astronomy, animals, and other areas of life.
The theory that the Anunnaki originated from “Nibiru,” a.k.a. “Planet X” has been used in alternate narratives about Sumer. However, NASA discards the Planet X theory, characterizing the existence of the planet as “hypothetical.” This so-called planet orbits about twenty times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune, and it may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years for one orbit around its sun to be completed.
Why was the Anunnaki movie production canceled midway?
In 2006, an unknown American director, Jon Gress, began filming the most controversial film of the century. It would be the first part of a trilogy about the Anunnaki. In particular, it would start from their arrival on Earth 450,000 years ago and move on to the pre-and post-flood empires, the exodus, and possible return to mid-2012.
It was set to be an expensive, independent production based on Zecharia Sitchin’s books. The three parts were supposed to be released in 2007, 2008, and 2009.
Yet, although there was a lot of information on the shooting and overall production, it was suddenly canceled and internet posts about the movie began disappearing. The official website of the film was shut down, as was any link to it.
All images, videos, and information were likewise deleted from the internet. The Anunnaki movie was never released and evidence of its existence was permanently wiped away from media.
On YouTube, there are clips believed to be from the Anunnaki film production, but their authenticity is difficult to determine.
Nevertheless, the disappearance of information regarding the shooting of the Anunnaki film fueled more conspiracy theories of the “they don’t want you to know” type, making the Anunnaki a legend that will continue to fascinate and spark controversy at the same time.