In Sumerian and Akkadian texts, a collective term for a class of gods, written A.NUN.NA, which Assyriologists read as something close to “princely seed” or “offspring of Anu”. Zecharia Sitchin translated it “Those Who from Heaven to Earth Came” and identified it with the Hebrew Nefilim. On his account they are a technological species from Nibiru who arrived about 450,000 years ago to mine gold for a failing atmosphere, splashed down in the Persian Gulf fifty at a time under the scientist Enki, founded Eridu, mined southern Africa, and engineered Homo sapiens from a hominid stock when the miners mutinied; their quarrels, dynastic marriages and two Pyramid Wars then become the history of the ancient Near East. The lexical step is disputed and the standard dictionaries do not support the gloss; see Michael S. Heiser. A second position exists inside the same literature. Heather Lynn, writing in 2020, rejects Nibiru, rejects Sitchin’s translations and rejects the biological markers usually offered for a nonhuman species, and concludes that the Anunnaki were human: a physically distinct caste of advanced people, displaced by a northern catastrophe, who settled among Late Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers in the Near East around 8200 BCE and were remembered as gods because they were in fact further along. On that account the engineering of humanity is selective breeding and enclosure rather than genetics, and Eden is the first walled agricultural settlement. Her nonhuman element is relocated rather than dropped: the human elites are said to have been in contact with the apkallu, reached through altered states rather than met in the flesh. This entry records the textual figures and the use the modern genre makes of them, and is not a claim that a species by this name exists. It differs from every other entry in this folder in one way worth noting: no witness account describes an encounter with an entity identified as Anunnaki independently of the Sitchin literature. The name enters UAP culture through books and television rather than through reports.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Nibiru · Nefilim · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Enuma Elish · Michael S. Heiser · Ancient Aliens · Heather Lynn · Apkallu · Watchers · Atra-Hasis Epic · Erra Epic · The Wars of Gods and Men · Anu · Enlil · Enki · Inanna