An Akkadian cylinder seal in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, catalogue number VA 243, and the single object Zecharia Sitchin leans on hardest. He reads the rayed symbol in its upper left as the Sun and the eleven surrounding globes as the planets in correct order and relative size, which would make it a Sumerian solar-system map that includes Nibiru and so evidence that the arrangement was known before the telescope. Michael S. Heiser and others answer that the symbol is the conventional star motif that appears above deities on a great many seals, that the seal’s own inscription names its owner and says nothing about planets, and that the dots do not match planetary sizes or order once measured. A third reading has since been offered from inside the alternative field. Heather Lynn accepts that the symbol is not a sun, on the grounds that Sumerian convention gives suns six or eight points while stars are rendered as dots and the Pleiades as a group of seven, and proposes instead that the eleven dots are a constellation: the only eleven-star figure in the MUL.APIN catalogue is the Bison-Man, Centaurus, which appears hung on a chariot beam in Ninurta’s Return to Nippur. She offers it with an explicit disclaimer, that it is no more than as good as any other explanation on the table, and it has not been taken up in the specialist literature. Not in dispute in any of the three readings: the seated deity handing a plough to a standing figure, and an inscription naming the seal’s owner, Dubsiga. All three readings are of the same real, well photographed, publicly catalogued object, which is what makes it the most useful exhibit in the whole argument: a reader can go and look at it rather than take either side’s word for it.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Nibiru · Michael S. Heiser · Enuma Elish · Anunnaki · Giza Iron Plate · Heather Lynn · Apkallu