Zecharia Sitchin
Zecharia Sitchin was an author famous for his ideas of ancient astronauts. Born in 1920, Sitchin spent his childhood learning ancient languages and eventually used this information to attempt deciphering the archaic Sumerian clay tablets. These tablets had been analyzed by many scholars before Sitchin and the information that is said to be embedded in them varies from day to day bookkeeping to offering minute previously unknown details of the lives of ancient Mesopotamians to geometric calculations to predict the movement of the stars. Sitchin’s own interpretation was that an ancient race of aliens dubbed the Anunnaki from the planet Nibiru gave the Sumerians the technological finesse to know the intricacies of math and science. Like many ancient astronaut theorists, Sitchin backs up his claims with misinterpretations, pseudo-history, and the belief that there is no way that the people of ancient Sumer were astute enough to have come up with these astronomical calculations. Sitchin continued to believe and spread these claims, despite having no factual or scholarly supported evidence, until he died in 2010.
Personal Life
Zecharia Sitchin was born on July 11, 1920 in Baku, Azerbaijan of the SSR, but was raised in mandatory Palestine, which is modern day Israel. He was the son of Isaac and Genia Sitchin. As a child, he was obsessed with the idea of Nephilim, which, according to the bible, are “the sons of deities”. While growing up, Sitchin began learning a multitude of ancient languages such as Hebrew, Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, and Canaanite. With this information, he claimed to decipher many ancient texts and tales, as well as being involved in many archaeological finds. Sitchin received a degree in economic history from the University of London. He moved to New York City, New York in 1952, but before that he worked as an editor and journalist in Israel. He lived in New York City with his wife (died in 2007) and children until he died on October 9, 2010 at 90 years old.
Books
Sitchin published a total of 16 books in his lifetime, the first published in 1976 and last published in 2015. His last two books were published 3 and 5 years after he died. His books list as the following: “The 12th Planet” (1976), “The Stairway to Heaven” (1980), “The Wars of Gods and Men” (1985), “The Lost Realms” (1990), “When Time Began” (1993), “The Cosmic Code” (1998), and “The End of Days” (2007) conclude the Earth Chronicles series. The next four are companion books and they list as the following: “Genesis Revisited” (1990), “Divine Encounters” (1995), and “The Earth Chronicles Handbook” (1995), “There Were Giants Upon the Earth” (2010). Sitchin’s last 3 published books are standalone novels and they list as the following: “The Lost Book of Enki” (2001), “The King Who Refused to Die” (2013), and “The Anunnaki Chronicles” (2015).
Pseudo Archaeological Ideas
Sitchin’s obsession with Nephilim began as a child over a dispute about the word's translation. A teacher of his claimed it simply meant “giant” while Sitchin disagreed as the literal translation was “those who were cast down”. Believing this could be interpreted as those who were cast down to Earth, Sitchin believes that this was what began his fascination and his journey to discovering the secrets of the Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets. Much of Sitchin's proof comes from perceived connections from Mesopotamia to the bible.
Sitchin’s arguably most influential book was his first book published. It is titled “The 12th Planet”. In this book, Sitchin claims the existence of a “12th planet” in our solar system called Nibiru (or Planet X). The evidence provided for this claim is from the famed Sumerian scribed clay tablets. These tablets are inscribed with cuneiform, an ancient language that prevailed for 3 millenia. According to Sitchin, he alone could read and correctly interpret these tablets. Nibiru is said to only come near Earth every ~3,600 years because of its long elliptical orbit. The inhabitants that Sitchin claimed lived on this planet were dubbed the Anunnaki. Sitchin also believed that the Anunnaki were the Nephilim that are referenced in the bible in The Book of Genesis. These technologically advanced, nine feet tall peoples supposedly arrived on Earth 450,000 years ago, landing in the Persian gulf in search of natural resources, specifically gold. In order to mine this gold, the Anunnaki genetically engineered a new species from Anunnaki genes and a native species Homo erectus. Thus Homo sapiens were born.
A considerable explanation for Sitchins ideas are based around the assumption that, not only did the Sumer civilization spring up out of nowhere, but also that the evolution of the modern man (Homo sapiens) was impossible within the span of time that it happened. Sitchin believed that this evolution was out of the ordinary when compared to the slower evolutionary developments that modern humans obtained. Along with these allegations about culture and genetics, Sitchin perceived the transformation from a nomadic hunter-gatherer based living to a sedentary agricultural based one as improbable and without reason.
Mesopotamian Myth and History
According to Mesopatamian mythology, the Anunnaki is the name for the highest gods and goddesses in their pantheon, also sometimes referred to as the Anunna. This pantheon consists of seven most powerful and important deities. They are named An (primordial god of the cosmos), Enlil (god of the winds and the fates), Enki (most likely seen as god of water), Ninhursaĝ (original mother goddess), Nanna (god of the moon), Utu (god of the sun, stands for the light of the sun), and Inana (goddess of love, but fiery, passionate, and sexual love). These names are different according to where exactly in Mesopotamia you are focusing, as Akkadians may have different names from some of these beings. The difference between these empires was where they were located with Akkad in northern Mesopotamia and Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. Eventually Akkad conquered southern Sumer and united northern and southern Mesopotamia under one ruler. These divine beings were worshiped in ziggurats, layered pyramids with a flat top. One of the most important tasks that the Anunna were responsible for was deciding the fates of those who worshipped them.
The famous tablets that Sitchin claimed he alone could read, are a set of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform. Translations from other scholars pose a very different story than the one Sitchin constructed. According to scholars, the translation is of geometric calculations used to predict the motions of Jupiter, which the Sumerians called Nibiru, the celestial body affiliated with the god Marduk (head of the Mesopotamian pantheon in the first millennium) the patron god of Babylon, the southern capital of Mesopotamia. Babylon was the center of Mesopotamian civilization for roughly two millennia.
Rebuttals to Sitchin's Claims
Sitchin claims that the Sumerian tablets talk about knowledge of Nibiru, a planet beyond Pluto. This idea is the root of his entire belief system. But according to scholars who are skeptical about Sitchin’s beliefs, his translations are not only incorrect but completely made up. One argument against Sitchin is the literal translation of the word Nibiru. This term has a variety of meanings, most of which are related to the idea of “crossing” or of being a “crossing point”. More specific translations can be “place of crossing”, “crossing fee”, “ferry, ford”, “ferry boat”, and “act of ferrying”. These translations are mostly referenced in various Sumerian tablets. In addition to these translations, there is a very small number of cases in which this word can be related to an astronomical body. In the astronomical texts that refer to Nibiru in the context of the cosmos, the allusion is to the planet Jupiter, and in one case Mercury. Other than a planet, Nibiru is directly referred to as a star in the text. Another interpretation is from Enuma Elish, also known as Tablet V, where Nibiru is said to be a name of the god Marduk. There is no mention of Nibiru as a planet beyond Pluto anywhere in the Sumerian clay tablets.
According to other scholarly translations, the earliest that the tablets that hold the astronomical translations of Nibiru can be is back to about 1800 B.C. This is significantly later than Sitchin claimed. He also claimed that the ancient Sumerians had the knowledge that there were 12 planets in the solar system. The reasoning for this is his interpretation of cylinder seal VA 243. Sitchin claims that there is a sun symbol on this cylinder seal, and that this symbol represented the entire solar system, thus the Sumerians knew about the 12 planets supposedly in the solar system. But with this idea in mind, other scholars compared this “sun” symbol to other symbols that are known to be a representation of the sun and the symbols do not match up. This design is most likely in reference to a constellation that would be visible to the naked eye or in reference to a deity and/or god.