Damn Those Lying Ancient Texts!

Last week, I discussed the elastic definition of “ancient texts” employed by the History Channel documentary series Ancient Aliens and the ancient astronaut theorists (AATs) who appear on the program, especially Giorgio Tsoukalos, the publisher of the ancient astronaut journal Legendary Times and a consulting producer on the series. Today I’d like to look at the use of a specific set of “ancient texts” in the ancient astronaut theory in order to show the way AATs somehow manage to undercut their own theory due to their misunderstanding or ignorance of the ancient texts they purport to cite.

Our example today comes from the Ancient Aliens episode that aired September 15, 2011, entitled “Aliens and Lost Worlds.” In the final third of the program, the documentary went in search of the alien origins of the Garden of Eden. In so doing, it drew on the now-common knowledge that the biblical narrative finds its origin in Mesopotamian mythology, which included an earthly paradise.

The program then went on to discuss the Sumerian gods, including those who were present at the creation of humanity. As related by the narrator of the program, the Sumerian gods known as the “Anunnaki” were really “an alien race,” according, once again, to those all-important ancient texts. These texts are cited simply as “Sumerian cuneiform tablets.”

These Anunnaki were made famous in ancient astronaut circles through the work of Zecharia Sitchin, whose eccentric interpretations of Near Eastern texts transformed the high gods of Mesopotamia into a race of aliens who lived on a wandering planet and lusted after earth’s gold. But the idea of the Sumerian gods as aliens is older still, expressed even in Erich von Däniken’s 1968 Chariots of the Gods?: “Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian cuneiform inscriptions constantly present the same picture: ‘gods’ came from the stars and went back to them…”

But this is not the case. First, Sumerian texts are rare and spotty; they do not contain stories of the Anunnaki as such. Instead, the Annunaki are best attested in the later Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, where they are simply gods created by Marduk, the chief god. He creates 600 Anunnaki, dividing them into two groups: 300 he placed in the sky, and 300 he placed in the sea down under the earth. Far from coming from the stars, in Enuma Elish 5.125-128, the gods in fact rise up from the underground sea called the Apsû as well as descend from the heavens:

When you come up from the Apsû to make a decision
This will be your resting place before the assembly.
When you descend from heaven to make a decision
This will be your resting place before the assembly.
(trans. W. G. Lambert)

Thus, there is no clear implication that the gods belong to the stars.

But the Anunnaki do have an interesting role that AATs ought to have quickly embraced. In the Enuma Elish (6.53-63), these gods work on the earth to make bricks for Marduk’s ziggurat of Esagil in Babylon, an actual building that still exists to this day:

[“]Let us erect a shrine to house a pedestal
Wherein we may repose when we finish (the work).”
When Marduk heard this,
He beamed as brightly as the light of day,
“Build Babylon, the task you have sought.
Let bricks for it be moulded, and raise the shrine!”
The Anunnaki wielded the pick.
For one year they made the needed bricks.
When the second year arrived,
They raised the peak of Esagil, a replica of the Apsû.
They built the lofty temple tower of the Apsû […]
(trans. W. G. Lambert)

Reconstruction of the Etemenanki ziggurat of Babylon, 1919 drawing. (Wikimedia Commons)

Ironically, this “ancient text” actually has the Anunnaki—identified by Ancient Aliens as aliens—building a real, currently-extant, pyramid-shaped structure. According to the text, they built both the temple of Marduk called Esagila and the “lofty temple tower,” the ziggurat of Etemenaki, that abutted it. What a shame that after archaeology failed to find extraterrestrial artifacts in any prehistoric building, modern ancient astronaut theorists no longer advocate alien construction but instead talk about more nebulous “influences.”

After all, the aliens apparently didn't build to last. Ruins of Babylon, 1932. (Library of Congress)

The episode of Ancient Aliens claiming these Anunnaki as ETs aired September 15, 2011. Just 24 hours earlier, Giorgio Tsoukalos, TV’s leading AAT, tweeted: “Repeat after me: The pyramids were NOT built by aliens. According to ancient Egyptian texts, the pyramids were built by humans WITH THE ASSISTANCE of the ‘Guardians of the Sky’…”

Now the Egyptian pyramids are not the same as the Mesopotamian ziggurats, but it hardly makes sense to suggest that humans constructed the massive stone constructions of Egypt while Mesopotamia’s rather simpler ziggurats, made from piles of dried mud bricks, required aliens to physically work for two years in the deserts of Iraq. Surely, if the aliens didn’t build the pyramids, they did not build the ziggurats either.

Damn those lying “ancient texts”!

A problem arises in that the “ancient text” Tsoukalos cites as his source, Al-Maqrizi’s Al-Khitat, was actually written in 1400 CE, four thousand years after the pyramids were built, whereas the “ancient text” telling us that the Anunnaki built the ziggurat of Babylon was written roughly at the time of the building’s construction. (The ziggurat dates back perhaps as far as 1500 BCE, while the poem was first written around 1500 BCE, with surviving copies dating from 650 BCE.)

Another problem arises here. The ziggurat of Babylon, known as Etemenanki, served a secondary purpose in the Hebrew literature: Most scholars believe it was the Tower of Babel. According to AATs, however, the Tower of Babel was destroyed by aliens (pretending to be God) in order to keep humans subservient to their extraterrestrial overlords when humans built the tower too high. Unless they didn’t. Erich von Däniken thought in Gods from Outer Space (1970) that the Tower of Babel was an observation post for monitoring the aliens, while Zecharia Sitchin ridiculously thought it was some kind of Saturn V-style rocket in Twelfth Planet (1976). This is especially ironic since Sitchin’s entire corpus was predicated on the idea that the Anunnaki were aliens—and yet he misses their most significant, and testable, earthly achievement, the construction of an actual set of buildings that anyone can visit today.

Obviously, the talking heads on Ancient Aliens have trouble using “ancient texts” consistently, or even accurately, even when they would appear to support their own views. If the “aliens” did not build the ziggurat—and there is not a shred of evidence that anyone other than humans worked on it—then the “ancient text” cited above is wrong. And if we admit that ancient texts can be incorrect, what warrant do we have to assume they are correct about other alleged alien incidents?