The Babylonian creation epic on seven tablets, recovered from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh and first put into English by L. W. King as The Seven Tablets of Creation (1902), which is the edition Zecharia Sitchin works from; Benjamin Foster’s Before the Muses is the modern translation. It narrates Marduk’s defeat of the primordial Tiamat and the making of heaven and earth from her divided body, and Assyriologists read it as a theogony composed to justify Marduk’s supremacy at Babylon. Sitchin reads it instead as a literal cosmogony of the solar system: Apsu is the Sun, Mummu is Mercury, Tiamat a planet beyond Mars, the later gods the outer planets in order, and Marduk the invader Nibiru, whose satellites strike Tiamat so that her upper half becomes the Earth, her lower half the asteroid belt, and her chief satellite Kingu the Moon. “But why not take the epic at face value,” he asks, “as nothing more nor less than the statement of cosmologic facts as known to the Sumerians.” The text is real, published and available in scholarly editions, and a reader can compare his paraphrases with it. The planetary identification is the contested step, and it was made after the modern outer planets were already known.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Nibiru · Anunnaki · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Cylinder Seal VA 243 · Michael S. Heiser · Atra-Hasis Epic · Erra Epic · Anu · Marduk · Tiamat