Journalist, editor and self-taught reader of cuneiform, born in 1920 and raised in Palestine under the British Mandate, who published The 12th Planet in 1976 and thirteen further books before his death in October 2010. One thesis runs through all of them: that the texts scholars classify as Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian and Hebrew myth are literal reportage. Nibiru circles the Sun once every 3,600 years; its inhabitants the Anunnaki came to Earth some 450,000 years ago to mine gold for a failing atmosphere; when the miners mutinied they engineered Homo sapiens from a hominid stock to do the work. He stated the interpretive decision underneath it himself, more plainly than most summaries do: “The only basic difference between me and all other scholars is that I do not consider these tales as ‘myth.’ I consider them as true records of the past.” He was not a trained Assyriologist and never claimed to be. The raw materials are real and his history of their recovery is accurate; what carries the scenario is a set of specific translations, of Anunnaki, Nefilim, shem and DIN.GIR, which Michael S. Heiser and working Assyriologists read differently. He supplied the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis with the named cast that Ancient Aliens later broadcast, and most online use of that vocabulary no longer cites him. The posthumous reader has its own entry at The Anunnaki Chronicles.
Connections
Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Anunnaki · Nibiru · Nefilim · Enuma Elish · Michael S. Heiser · Cylinder Seal VA 243 · Erich von Daniken · The Anunnaki Chronicles · The Wars of Gods and Men · Erra Epic · Atra-Hasis Epic · Kenneth Feder · Baalbek · Dilmun · Olmec Colossal Heads · Samuel Noah Kramer