Sitchin's Wars of Gods and Men, the chronicle that ends in a nuclear strike

THE BOOK

The Wars of Gods and Men, by Zecharia Sitchin, the third book of The Earth Chronicles. First published by Avon Books, New York, in 1985, and in hardcover by Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1992. The copy used here is Volume III of the Bear & Company collector’s edition of The Complete Earth Chronicles (Rochester, Vermont; boxed set issued 2014), whose copyright page reads 1990, 1991 and 2002. A one-page foreword, fourteen chapters and an epilogue, 344 pages, followed by a time chart, a source list and an index, with 107 numbered figures reproducing seals, reliefs, inscriptions and plans. Quotations and page references follow this edition.

What the book is

The Wars of Gods and Men is the volume in which Zecharia Sitchin stops assembling his framework and starts narrating inside it. The 12th Planet (1976) had proposed that the beings the Sumerians called Anunnaki were visitors from a planet on a 3,600-year orbit; The Stairway to Heaven (1980) had placed their post-Flood spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This book takes those two premises as given and writes the history that follows from them: a succession quarrel on the home planet, carried to Earth by two half-brothers and their descendants, fought across hundreds of thousands of years over the land that held the space facilities, and settled at last by force. The foreword states the whole of it in five sentences. “Long before man warred with man, the gods battled among themselves. Indeed, it was as the Wars of the Gods that the Wars of Man began” (p. vi). And then: “It was thus that mankind’s first civilization succumbed to a nuclear holocaust. This is fact, not fiction; it has all been written down long ago, in the Earth Chronicles” (p. vi).

The book’s method is the one Sitchin uses throughout the series, applied here without let-up. Wherever an ancient text describes a god doing something, he reads the description as a technical report by a witness who lacked the vocabulary. A Winged Disk from which a lord looses a storm that cannot be seen or heard is an aircraft firing a weapon; a Thunder-Stone hurled at a mountain, followed by heat, glare and duststorm, is a detonation; the MEs that Inanna carries off from Enki’s Abzu are, he suggests, “something like our present-day computer chips, on which data, programs, and operational orders have been minutely recorded” (p. 239). Applied consistently, that move produces a continuous chronicle with a cast, a map and a chronology, and the chronicle is what the book delivers.

This note treats the book the way the site treats any interpretive synthesis, evidence tier 4. The tier rates the route, not the author. The texts Sitchin builds from are real and are quoted at length from the standard editions; the monuments stand where he says they stand; the history of their recovery is told accurately. The load-bearing moves are a set of translations of particular words and names, a rule for treating resemblance between traditions as evidence of a shared event, and a reading of one Babylonian poem as an eyewitness report. The sections below keep those layers apart.

Who wrote it

Zecharia Sitchin (1920 to 2010) was born in Baku, grew up in Mandate Palestine, worked as a journalist and editor in Israel and then for a shipping company in New York, and taught himself to read cuneiform. He was not trained as an Assyriologist and the book does not claim that he was. The 12th Planet appeared in 1976 and was followed by thirteen further books, seven of them making up The Earth Chronicles; this is the third. The site’s source note on The Anunnaki Chronicles, the posthumous anthology of his work, carries a fuller account of the man and of the reception of his thesis. Two things about him bear directly on this volume. He read very widely in the primary publications of his field, and he cites them by editor and title. And he was candid about method: “we believe,” “we suggest,” “our own theory” and “according to our calculations” recur throughout, and he marks where a tablet is broken and where he is filling the gap.

How the book is built

The volume has a deliberate three-part shape.

Chapters 1 to 3 establish the pattern from the outside in. Chapter 1 is a survey of documented human warfare from Troy to Alexander, in which every conqueror on record, from Thothmes III at Megiddo to Sennacherib at Jerusalem, says in his own inscriptions that a named god ordered the campaign and often took the field in person. Chapters 2 and 3 move to Egypt, Greece and India, and argue that the Edfu inscription, Hesiod’s Theogony and the Vedas preserve the same succession wars, the same castrations, the same flying vehicles and the same radiating weapons.

Chapters 4 to 9 install the Sumerian framework and run the wars. Chapter 4 uses Hittite treaty texts to argue that all these pantheons are one pantheon under different names, then narrates the arrival of the Anunnaki, the gold mission, the usurpation of Nibiru’s throne and the casting of lots that gave Earth to Enlil. Chapters 5 to 9 give the war of the Titans, the theft of the Tablet of Destinies by Zu, the creation of the Primitive Worker, the Deluge, the post-Flood division of Earth, two Pyramid Wars fought over Giza, and the peace conference that ended them.

Chapters 10 to 14 narrow to a single storyline. Marduk’s exile, live entombment in the Great Pyramid and release; Inanna’s rise and the empire of Sargon; the collapse of Ur; Abraham, read as a Nippurian nobleman on a military posting; and the strike of 2024 B.C. The epilogue records the aftermath, and the book’s last sentence hands the story to Genesis: “Sumer was no more; but in a distant land, the baton of its legacy passed from the hands of Abraham and Isaac his son unto the hand of Jacob, the one renamed Isra-El” (p. 344).

Three habits run through all of it, and it is worth naming them because the evidence section below sorts by them. Names are decomposed into syllables and the syllables translated, and the result is treated as a fact about the thing named. Where two traditions tell similar stories, the similarity is read as evidence that both report the same event. And wherever a mainstream account has a gap, the gap is offered as a place where Sitchin’s account fits.

The chain of the argument

The book advances a history in which each stage supplies the premise of the next.

The pattern first. Chapter 1’s survey is the book’s foundation, and it is doing rhetorical work: by its end, “gods took part in wars” has become a commonplace of ancient testimony rather than an exotic claim. The Dead Sea war scroll foresees a final battle fought “with a show of godlike might, amid uproarious tumult, amid the war cries of gods and men” (p. 2); Ashurbanipal writes that “Ishtar, who dwells in Arbela, clad in Divine Fire and sporting the Radiant Headwear, rained flames upon Arabia” (p. 19); Herodotus reports the priests’ statement that “Egypt had gods for its rulers, who dwelt upon the Earth with men, one of them being always supreme above the rest” (p. 33). The Edfu text then supplies what Sitchin calls the first war in which gods armed men: Horus “in the heights of the skies, from the Winged Disk, he saw the enemies, and came upon them from behind. From his forepart he let loose against them a Storm which they could neither see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears” (p. 27), and the “weapon of thirty” of the hieroglyphic texts becomes, in his reading, “an ingenious three-in-one rocket: as the first, larger missile was fired, the way was opened for the two smaller missiles to be launched” (p. 46).

The succession rule. The single most productive idea in the book is a law of inheritance that Sitchin reconstructs from the Egyptian and Sumerian god-lists and then applies everywhere: the firstborn son is heir, but a son later born to the ruler by his own half-sister supersedes him. This gives him a motive for Seth against Osiris, for Cronos against Uranus, for Ninurta against Nannar, and above all for Marduk, Enki’s firstborn, disinherited by the rule and spending the whole book trying to take a supremacy he was never granted. Hesiod’s account of the castration of Uranus (p. 51), the Hittite Kingship in Heaven text in which “Alalush was seated on the throne; The mighty Anush, first among the gods, was standing before him” (p. 84), and the Atra-Hasis lines in which “The gods clasped hands together, then cast lots and divided: Anu to heaven went up; To Enlil the Earth was made subject” (p. 85) are read as three records of one dynastic history.

The planet and the numbers. The Sumerians, Sitchin writes, “considered it a twelfth member of our Solar System, a system made up of the Sun in the center, the Moon, all the nine planets we know of today, and one more large planet whose orbit lasts a Sar, 3,600 Earth-years” (p. 77). The rank numbers of the gods, Anu 60, Enlil 50, Ea 40, become a command structure; the determinative DIN.GIR becomes a compound noun about rocketry; and the Titans are explained by a syllable reading: “if the tales had a Sumerian origin, and if so did these gods’ names, then TI.TA.AN in Sumerian would have literally meant ‘Those Who in Heaven Live’” (p. 95), which makes them the Igigi, the astronauts who stayed in orbit.

Man as labour. The Atra-Hasis mutiny gives the book its account of human origins. Enki proposes to the assembled gods: “Let her create a Primitive Worker; And let him bear the yoke… Let the Worker carry the toil of the gods, Let him bear the yoke!” (p. 104). Procreation is granted later without authorisation, the Eden story becomes a licensing dispute, and the sons of the gods take Earthling wives, in Sitchin’s own rendering of Genesis 6, “of whichever they chose” (p. 116).

The map. Chapter 7 is where the history becomes territorial. The Table of Nations in Genesis 10, Sitchin argues, “followed not only the geography and topography of the areas to which man had spread, it also followed the division of the Earth between the descendants of Enlil and the descendants of Enki” (p. 130). The fourth region, TIL.MUN, read as “Land of the Missiles,” is the Sinai, given to the neutral Ninharsag. A landing grid is drawn from the twin peaks of Ararat down a forty-five-degree line through the platform at Baalbek to the 30th parallel, and the Giza pyramids are placed on it as artificial twin peaks anchoring the corridor’s northern edge: “This, we believe, is how the Landing Grid was laid out, how the site of the Spaceport was marked off, and how the great pyramids of Giza had come into being” (p. 135). The pyramids are dated to about 10,000 B.C. and their Pharaonic attribution is rejected; Khufu’s Inventory Stela, in which the king “founded the House of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramid, beside the House of the Sphinx” (p. 148), is read as proof that both already stood in his reign.

The wars over the map. Once the assets are fixed, every conflict has the same objective. Chapter 8 reads the Edfu inscription as the First Pyramid War and the Sumerian Lugal-e as the Second, in which Ninurta, “who into the throes of the Mountainlands stepped forth” (p. 159), besieges the Enkite gods inside the Great Pyramid and, on entering it “circa 8670 B.C. according to our calculations” (p. 167), strips out its crystals and instruments one by one. Chapter 9 ends the wars as historic wars have ended, “with a peace conference; with the gathering of the combatants, as at the Congress of Vienna” (p. 173). The settlement hands the Sinai to the line of Sin, and Sitchin adds: “Ever since then, and to this very day, the Land of the Spaceport has been known as Sin’s land, the Sinai peninsula” (p. 180).

The prisoner and the queen. Chapter 10 offers Sitchin’s own reconstruction of how the Great Pyramid was planned, from three equal circles of sixty Sacred Cubits, and argues that the twisting segment of its Well Shaft was cut later, to rescue Marduk, tried by the gods and sentenced, on Inanna’s proposal, to be sealed alive inside: “In a great envelope that is sealed, With no one to offer him nourishment; Alone to suffer, The potable watersource to be cut off” (p. 223). An Assyrian text, which Sitchin says served as the script for a New Year mystery play at Babylon, describes the mourners “after the gods had locked him up, separating him from among the living. Into the House of Captivity, away from the sun and light, they put him in prison” (p. 225). Chapters 11 and 12 follow Inanna’s rise, the elevation of Sargon, who “knew not my father” (p. 246), and the sacrilege for which “the great lord Marduk became enraged and destroyed his people by hunger” (p. 250); then the Erra text in which Marduk complains that “In the aftermath of the Deluge, the decrees of Heaven and Earth had gone astray” (p. 253); then a coup in which “The heavenly kingship was seized by a female” (p. 260); and finally the collapse of Ur. Chapter 12 closes: “And then Awesome Weapons were unleashed, and disaster, unlike any that befell mankind since the Deluge, struck” (p. 280).

Abraham. Chapter 13 dates the patriarch from the Bible’s own arithmetic to a birth in 2123 B.C., matches his movements year for year to the last kings of Ur, identifies Amraphel of Genesis 14 with Amar-Sin, and derives the word Hebrew from the name of Nippur: “In stating that Abraham was an Ibri, the Bible simply meant that Abraham was a Ni-ib-ri, a man of Nippurian origin!” (p. 295). The conclusion follows: “The mission of Abraham was a military one: to protect the space facilities of the Anunnaki, the Mission Control Center and the Spaceport!” (p. 301).

The strike. Chapter 14 reads Genesis 18 and 19 for four features it says no natural catastrophe can have. The destruction of Sodom was announced in advance; it was conditional on whether ten righteous men could be found; it was postponed at Lot’s request until he reached Zoar; and it spared specific people and one named town. A predictable, avoidable, postponable and selectively targeted event, Sitchin argues, is a decision. He then identifies that decision with the council described in the Erra Epic, in which Ninurta, under the name Ishum, asks Nergal, under the name Erra: “Valiant Erra, Will you the righteous destroy with the unrighteous?” (p. 327), and in which, once targets are agreed, “Ishum to Mount Most Supreme set his course; The Awesome Seven, [weapons] without parallel, trailed behind him. At the Mount Most Supreme the hero arrived; He raised his hand, the mount was smashed” (p. 328), while “Erra the King’s Highway followed. The cities he finished off, to desolation he overturned them” (p. 329). The cities of the plain, in this reading, “were only a sideshow: concurrently, the Spaceport in the Sinai peninsula was also obliterated with nuclear weapons, leaving behind a deadly radiation that lingered on for many years thereafter” (p. 317). The fallout is then read out of the Sumerian city laments, which “describe desolation, not destruction. The cities were there but without people; the stalls were there but without cattle; the sheepfolds remained but were empty; the rivers flowed but their waters became bitter” (p. 336), and in which “The people, terrified, could hardly breathe; the Evil Wind clutched them, does not grant them another day” (p. 337). The date is 2024 B.C.

The parts a reader can check

Much of the book’s raw material is real and is quoted at length rather than paraphrased, so a reader can go to it without trusting anyone.

Chapter 1 is an anthology of a real phenomenon. Ancient Near Eastern rulers did claim, in their own inscriptions and in the first person, to fight on the explicit orders of named gods, and sometimes with the god present on the field. The Kadesh inscriptions of Ramses II, the annals of Thothmes III, the prisms of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, the Legend of Naram-Sin and the Dead Sea war scroll all say what Sitchin says they say, and the chapter reads well as a short survey of that fact whatever one makes of the rest.

The texts exist. The Edfu inscription published by Brugsch in 1870; the Kumarbi cycle from Boghazkoi as edited by Güterbock and Otten; the Myth of Zu, whose opening was reconstructed by Hallo and Moran in 1979; the Atra-Hasis Epic; Lugal-e; the Nippur cylinder published by Barton; Inanna and Ebih; the Ashur and Nineveh tablets on Marduk’s imprisonment, edited by Zimmern and Langdon; The Curse of Agade; the Spartoli tablets that Pinches read to the Victoria Institute in 1897; the Erra Epic; and the laments for Ur, Nippur, Uruk and Eridu are all real documents in scholarly editions. Sitchin names his editors and their publications, and a reader can set his rendering beside theirs.

The treaty god-list is a real datum. The treaty of about 1350 B.C. between the Hittite king Shuppiluliuma and Mattiwaza (Shattiwaza in current usage) of Mitanni, whose duplicate was found at Arinna, does invoke Mitra, Varuna, Indra and the Nasatya twins alongside Anu, Enlil, Ea, Sin, Nergal, Ninurta and Ishtar. Hittitologists have long noted it as evidence of an Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni ruling class. What Sitchin infers from it is a separate matter.

The Great Pyramid’s features are real. The swivel-stone entrance, the three granite plugs at the foot of the Ascending Passage, the seven-segment Well Shaft with its one crudely cut section, the Grotto, the burst ramp stone at the Grand Gallery, the fine white dust reported by early explorers, the missing apex and the bare, uninscribed chambers are all as described. Chapter 10’s geometry can be checked against published surveys, and the Edgar brothers’ measurements, which Sitchin relies on and then reinterprets, are in print.

The Antarctic meteorites are real. ALHA 81005, collected in January 1982, was confirmed as lunar in March 1983; the Martian origin of the SNC meteorites was settled the same year when gases trapped in EETA 79001 matched the Viking measurements of the Martian atmosphere. Sitchin’s premise here is correct.

The Ur laments do say what he says. The Lament for Sumer and Ur and its companions dwell on emptiness rather than rubble: cities standing but unpeopled, an unseen death that passes doors and bolts, fields growing only weeds. Sitchin has noticed something a reader can confirm from any translation. What it means is the contested part.

The Vyse episode has a documentary trail. Howard Vyse did blast his way into the relieving chambers in 1837 and did report the painted cartouches, and the coffin and bones from the Third Pyramid have indeed been dated far later than the Fourth Dynasty. Whether the cartouches are genuine is the disputed part, and the note comes back to it below.

Where the book’s own evidence sits

The book presents nearly all of its material at a similar level of confidence. Sorted instead by how far each claim can be checked from outside, and by what specialists have published:

Real texts, contested translations. This is the largest category and the one the history stands on. TIL.MUN as “Land of the Missiles,” NI.IB.RU as the root of Ibri, TI.TA.AN as “Those Who in Heaven Live,” SHU.LIM as “The Supreme Place of the Four Regions,” DIN.GIR as a rocket compound: none is supported in the book by a lexical entry, a sign list or a competing reading. The competing readings exist. Dilmun is a place name, identified since the nineteenth century with Bahrain and the adjoining eastern Arabian coast on the strength of Assyrian royal inscriptions and the excavations at Qal’at al-Bahrain and on Failaka; the book’s relocation of it to the Sinai is the hinge on which the spaceport, the landing corridor and the strike all turn. The most sustained published critic, Michael S. Heiser (1963 to 2023), who held a doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Semitic studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that Sitchin never cites the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary or the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary for any of the load-bearing readings, and that the standard glosses run the other way: Anunna(ki) as something like “princely offspring,” with no link to the sky-god An; nibiru as “crossing” or “ford,” applied in the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN to Jupiter and elsewhere to Mercury; DINGIR as the logogram for “god,” which as a determinative is not pronounced at all. Ronald H. Fritze, in Invented Knowledge (2009), writes that Sitchin’s assignment of meanings to ancient words is “tendentious and frequently strained.” Heiser was a Semitist rather than a credentialed Assyriologist, and his case is in part a challenge to produce lexical support rather than a refutation reading by reading; a reader who wants to test any single etymology can go to the dictionaries themselves.

One equation, not a translation. Erra as a name of Nergal is standard. Ishum as a name of Ninurta is Sitchin’s own: the book states that “the Erra Epic keeps referring to Ninurta by the epithet Ishum (‘The Scorcher’)” (p. 327) and gives no ground for it. In the poem and in the god-lists Ishum is a distinct deity, Erra’s herald and counsellor, a divine night watchman with fire associations, equated in bilingual texts with the Sumerian Hendursanga; Andrew George’s 2015 study of the pair sets out the evidence. The identification matters more than any of the etymologies, because it is what welds Chapter 14 to the Pyramid Wars: it makes the god who pleads for the righteous the same figure who besieged Giza more than six thousand years earlier.

Resemblance read as record. Uranus, Seth and Kumarbi are all castrated in a succession struggle; Zeus, Indra and Teshub all fight a monster with a lightning weapon. The pattern is real. Sitchin reads it as three witnesses to one event. The usual scholarly account reads the Hurrian Kumarbi cycle as having reached Greece through Anatolia, and treats succession by mutilation as a narrative solution available to many cultures; the book does not argue against those alternatives, and does not raise them.

Real anomaly, alternative explanations. The Ur laments. The mainstream account of the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur is multi-causal: an Elamite invasion under Kindattu about 2004 B.C., Amorite pressure on the frontier, administrative and economic breakdown, provincial secession and famine. The laments belong to a genre of five Sumerian city laments in which the destruction is explicitly a divine decree, and Nili Samet, among others, reads their cosmological imagery, the storm, the darkness, the unseen death, as the form the genre gives to the collapse of a divinely ordered world rather than as physical description. Sitchin’s reading and the genre reading are two ways of taking a strange text seriously, and the note records both.

One poem, two dates. The book’s final identification, of the decision in Genesis 18 and 19 with the council of the Erra Epic, rests on overlap of vocabulary and incident between the two texts. The Erra Epic’s oldest manuscripts come from the seventh-century library at Nineveh; scholars place its composition between the ninth and seventh centuries B.C., most commonly the eighth; its colophon names Kabti-ilani-Marduk, who presents the poem as a vision received at night; and Andrew George reads it as an allegorical response to a long period of weak rule and disorder in Babylonia. The dating is debated within that range. What is not debated is that it is a first-millennium composition, which places it more than a thousand years after the events Sitchin dates to 2024 B.C. The book treats it as a contemporary record.

A physical claim with no physical test. The book’s title claim is a detonation, and it offers three physical exhibits for it: radioactivity in springs around the Dead Sea, reported by I. M. Blake in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly; the abandonment of settlements around the Dead Sea in the twenty-first century B.C., from Albright and Harland; and a satellite-visible scar and a field of blackened stones in the central Sinai plain, reproduced in two photographs. What a detonation of the scale described would leave is known from 1945: vitrified sand of the kind still lying at the Trinity site, a burn horizon datable by thermoluminescence, and fission-product isotopes in soil and sediment. The book reports no search for any of these, and none has been published for the central Sinai. The exhibits it does offer have ordinary accounts. The radioactivity of the Dead Sea’s coastal springs, like that of the springs around the Sea of Galilee, comes from radium and radon carried in deep brines, and has been studied as such by Israeli geochemists since the 1960s. The dark pavements of the Tih plateau are flint weathering out of a Tertiary limestone and coated with desert varnish, the manganese and iron oxide film that darkens exposed stone in arid regions generally. Whether the scar has a geological description is not a question the book asks. A reader who wants the claim tested rather than argued from texts will find that the test has not been run.

Astronomical claims, overtaken. Chapter 6 presents the twelfth planet as on the verge of confirmation, citing a 1978 finding at the U.S. Naval Observatory that Pluto was too small to account for perturbations in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, NASA’s 1982 statement and the IRAS “mystery celestial body” of late 1983. Each has since gone the other way. The Uranus residuals were removed in 1993 when E. M. Standish, using Voyager 2’s 1989 flyby, revised Neptune’s mass down by about half a percent: the perturbations that had called for a further planet were themselves the artefact. The IRAS sources of JPL’s release of 9 November 1983 were resolved as ultraluminous infrared galaxies (Houck and colleagues, Astrophysical Journal, 1985); the “mystery heavenly body” phrasing came from a Washington Post story of 30 December 1983 in which the mission’s chief scientist, Gerry Neugebauer, was quoted saying “it’s not incoming mail.” The Planet Nine hypothesis of Batygin and Brown (2016) proposes a body of several Earth masses at hundreds of astronomical units on an orbit of tens of thousands of years, never entering the inner system; it remains unconfirmed, and the Rubin Observatory survey that began in 2026 is expected to test it. The far-infrared record has moved since the IRAS verdict, and in a direction that sharpens the distinction rather than softening it. In 2025 Terry Long Phan and colleagues, in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, cross-matched IRAS (1983) with AKARI (2006) and reported one surviving candidate out of thirteen, consistent with a body of seven to seventeen Earth masses at 500 to 700 astronomical units, with follow-up imaging proposed. Two epochs cannot fix an orbit, and Michael Brown has said that if the object is real its orbit is not compatible with the clustering Planet Nine was proposed to explain. Whatever it turns out to be, it is a distant, slow, cold object of the Planet Nine kind, not a body that crosses between Mars and Jupiter every 3,600 years. The Antarctic meteorites, real as they are, are explained by impact ejection from the Moon and Mars, not by a planetary collision.

Live dispute, one side reported. The Vyse forgery. Chapter 7 presents the 1837 Khufu cartouche as a forgery witnessed by the master mason Humphries Brewer, on the strength of family records sent to Sitchin by a reader at the end of 1983. Egyptology treats the marks as authentic Old Kingdom work-gang inscriptions, using formulae not understood in 1837 and lying in sealed spaces awkward to reach, and since 2013 the Wadi al-Jarf papyri have independently named the monument Akhet-Khufu. The Brewer evidence is a single page of notes written by Walter M. Allen in 1954 about letters he attributed to his great-grandfather; the letters have not been produced. There is no dedicated Egyptological rebuttal in print, because the field treats the question as closed; the independent case is argued most fully by Creighton and Scranton in The Great Pyramid Hoax (2017). A reader who wants the dispute rather than the verdict will find real disagreement. The cleaner test of the chapter’s Giza dating is the Inventory Stela itself. Found by Auguste Mariette at Giza in 1858 in the temple of Isis, it is dated by Egyptology, on its language, its orthography and the deities it names, to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty in the seventh century B.C., some nineteen centuries after Khufu; the book reads it as a document of his reign and does not give its date.

Precise dates, unshown workings. Ninurta enters the pyramid “circa 8670 B.C.”; the pyramids are built “circa 10,000 B.C.”; the strike falls in 2024 B.C. Some of these come from Manetho’s regnal totals, which the book elsewhere treats as needing interpretation, and some from calculations it does not show. Manetho’s king list of the gods is a legendary tradition preserved through later excerptors, and three-digit precision derived from it should be read as the book’s own convention.

Method, unfalsifiable by construction. Where the mainstream account has a gap, the gap is offered as evidence for the reconstruction; where the reconstruction has a gap, the tablet is broken. The ending of the Kumarbi cycle, the trial of Marduk, the identity of one of the six sons in Enki’s division of Africa: in each case the missing material is the material that would test the reading. And where the texts say something that does not fit, the immortality of the gods, their divinity, they are read figuratively, as long lifespans and job titles, by a book whose whole argument is that they should be read literally. The note records the structure and leaves the reader to weigh it.

Forty-one years on

The book was written in 1985 and carries no note in its later printings. Read from 2026, its claims fall into three groups.

Claims that have gone the other way. The astronomical corroboration of Chapter 6, as above. The cold-war framing, in which the Harpoon missile and multiple-warhead rockets are the natural comparanda for Horus’s weapons, now reads as a record of the book’s own date. A reviewer of this chapter will also be asked about the Tall el-Hammam airburst paper of 2021, which proposed a Tunguska-sized event at a Jordan Valley site as the origin of the Sodom story; it was corrected twice, carried an editorial note from 2023, and was retracted in April 2025, with eleven of its authors dissenting and announcing an intention to republish. Nothing in it bore on Sitchin’s reading in either direction, and the archaeology of the cities of the plain remains inconclusive.

Claims that stand as observations. Chapter 1’s survey of divinely authorised warfare, the treaty god-list, the empty and apexless Great Pyramid, and the desolation reading of the Ur laments are all things a reader can confirm, and each is still in need of an explanation. Sitchin’s explanations are not the mainstream ones; the observations are his, and they are good ones.

Claims on which nothing has changed. The etymologies were challenged in print in the early 2000s and have not been defended lexically since; the Erra Epic’s date has not moved; Nibiru remains unobserved. The book’s reception has settled into two constituencies that do not read each other: mainstream archaeology and Assyriology classify the ancient-astronaut thesis as pseudoarchaeology and do not engage it as a competing hypothesis, Kenneth Feder’s Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries giving it a chapter in each edition; and survey data reported in Science in 2019 found that 41 per cent of Americans believed that aliens visited Earth in the ancient past.

The book after the book

The Wars of Gods and Men gave the ancient-astronaut genre its most fully worked storyline, and much of what circulates under the names Anunnaki, Nibiru, Enki and Enlil, the gold, the engineered worker and the nuclear war in the Sinai comes from this volume rather than from The 12th Planet. The History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, from 2009, draws on it throughout, and the vocabulary has passed from there into a great deal of online culture that no longer cites its source. Sitchin returned to the same ground in The Anunnaki Chronicles, the posthumous reader whose Chapter 8 reprints the Pyramid Wars, and Heather Lynn’s The Anunnaki Connection reworks the cast for a new decade. The empty Great Pyramid that Sitchin fills with a stripped instrument bay is the same absence Christopher Dunn fills with a power plant, and the disinherited firstborn who is exiled, tried, entombed and finally enthroned at Babylon is, read as a story, the book’s most sustained character.

The site’s instruments touch this book at several points, and one of them is built directly from it. The Landing Corridor bench takes Chapter 7’s geodesy, the Ararat line, the Baalbek platform, the Giza anchor and the 30th parallel, and runs it on the real ellipsoid; the bench was built from the anthology’s reprint of that material, and this book is where it was first laid out. The Nibiru orbit bench and the Tiamat collision bench price the Chapter 4 and Chapter 6 premises the history rests on, and the gold shield ledger prices the motive that sent the Anunnaki to Earth in the first place. The Orion correlation and King’s Chamber resonance benches test other claims about Giza that share this book’s starting point.

Read the book. Decide for yourself.

Source notes: The Anunnaki Chronicles, The Anunnaki Connection, Fingerprints of the Gods, The Giza Power Plant; review: Closer Encounters
Instruments: Landing Corridor, Nibiru Orbit, Tiamat Collision, Gold Shield, Precession and the Orion Correlation, King’s Chamber Resonance

References and further reading

Zecharia Sitchin, The Wars of Gods and Men (Avon Books, 1985; Bear & Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1992; collector’s edition, Bear & Company, Rochester, Vermont, 2014), the third book of The Earth Chronicles
Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet (Stein and Day, 1976) and The Stairway to Heaven (1980), the two volumes whose premises this book takes as given
Heinrich Brugsch, Die Sage von der geflügelten Sonnenscheibe (1870), the first publication of the Edfu inscription behind Chapters 2 and 8
Hesiod, Theogony, and R. T. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rig-Veda, the translations Chapter 3 quotes
H. G. Güterbock, Kumarbi: Mythen vom churritischen Kronos (1946), and H. Otten, Mythen vom Gotte Kumarbi: Neue Fragmente (1950), the Kumarbi cycle behind Chapters 4 and 5
W. W. Hallo and W. L. Moran, “The First Tablet of the SB Recension of the Anzu-Myth,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 31 (1979), the reconstruction of the Zu text’s opening
W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (1969), the standard edition of the epic Chapters 4 to 6 draw on
George A. Barton, Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions (1918), the Nippur cylinder behind Chapters 8 and 9
Stephen Langdon, The Babylonian Epic of Creation and the Mesopotamian New Year texts (1923), with Heinrich Zimmern’s 1921 reading, for the Marduk imprisonment text of Chapter 10
Theophilus G. Pinches, “Certain Inscriptions and Records Referring to Babylonia and Elam and Their Rulers,” Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 29 (1897), the Spartoli tablets behind Chapter 13
L. Cagni, L’Epopea di Erra (1969), and P. F. Gössmann, Das Era-Epos (1955), the two editions of the Erra Epic that Chapter 14 cites; for a current reading, Andrew George, “The Poem of Erra and Ishum: A Babylonian Poet’s View of War,” in Hugh Kennedy, ed., Warfare and Poetry in the Middle East (2013)
Andrew R. George, “The Gods Išum and Ḫendursanga: Night Watchmen and Street-lighting in Babylonia,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 67 (2015), on the god Sitchin equates with Ninurta
Samuel Noah Kramer, Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (1940), and Piotr Michalowski, The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur (1989); Nili Samet, The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (2014), for the genre reading
Michael S. Heiser, “The Myth of a Sumerian 12th Planet” and the associated essays at sitchiniswrong.com, from the early 2000s; The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and the Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, for the words in dispute; Hermann Hunger and David Pingree, MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform (1989), for nēberu
Ronald H. Fritze, Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions (Reaktion, 2009), p. 214, on Sitchin’s philology
E. M. Standish, “Planet X: No Dynamical Evidence in the Optical Observations,” Astronomical Journal 105 (1993), for the Neptune mass revision
J. R. Houck and colleagues, “Unidentified IRAS Sources: Ultrahigh-Luminosity Galaxies,” Astrophysical Journal 290, L5 (1985), for the resolution of the 1983 IRAS sources
Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, “Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System,” Astronomical Journal, January 2016; Terry Long Phan and colleagues, “A Search for Planet Nine with IRAS and AKARI Data,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2025, for the far-infrared candidate
Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner, The Red Sea Scrolls (2021), on the Wadi al-Jarf papyri; Scott Creighton and Laird Scranton, The Great Pyramid Hoax (Bear & Company, 2017), for the forgery case
Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology (11th edition, Oxford, 2025); Lizzie Wade, Science 364 (2019), p. 110, for the survey figure

Zecharia SitchinAnunnakiNibiruSumerGreat PyramidSinaiSodom and GomorrahErra EpicAbrahamAncient AstronautsHoward VyseBook

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