In the Mesopotamian astronomical texts nibiru is a crossing or a ford, applied to Jupiter, to Mercury, to the god Marduk and to a star. No tablet currently known names Nibiru as a planet or links it to the Anunnaki, a negative that Michael S. Heiser has pressed from outside the genre and that Heather Lynn concedes from inside it, reparsing Ne-Be-Ru from the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary as a forceful brazier diminishing as it is being thrown down and concluding that if the word denotes a body at all it denotes a comet. That reading has not been taken up by Assyriologists either, but the concession is worth recording: the demolition of the rogue planet is no longer only a mainstream position. Zecharia Sitchin read it instead as a twelfth planet on a 3,600-year orbit running from beyond Pluto to a perihelion between Mars and Jupiter, home of the Anunnaki, and identified it with the invader Marduk of the Enuma Elish whose satellites struck the primordial planet Tiamat and left the asteroid belt, the Earth and the Moon. No such object has been observed. A body of that mass on that orbit would perturb the inner planets observably, and the entire asteroid belt weighs roughly three per cent of the Moon, which is difficult to reconcile with the remains of a planet several times the size of Earth. The 1983 IRAS reports of a distant infrared source, which Sitchin’s October 1989 Frankfurt lecture cited as the detection, were subsequently explained as infrared cirrus and distant galaxies. The popular passage dates of 2003, 2012 and 2017 were not his, and NASA published a rebuttal of the 2012 version; Sitchin placed the return centuries away in The End of Days (2007). It is routinely conflated with Planet Nine, which is a different proposal with a different mass, a different orbit and no approach to the inner system at all.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · Anunnaki · Planet Nine · Enuma Elish · Michael S. Heiser · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Cylinder Seal VA 243 · Heather Lynn · The Wars of Gods and Men · Erra Epic · Marduk · Tiamat