Review of Ancient Aliens S20E07: “Secrets of the Sumerians”

​Well, here’s a change of pace. After a streak of six weeks of clip shows—embedded in more than six months of clips shows and reruns--Ancient Aliens returns with a putatively “new” episode. We have to take this with a big grain of salt, of course. Even “new” episodes have contained heavy doses of repeat material for most of the past decade or so. They ran out of “new” material back in the early 2010s. This episode, for example, covers the Sumerians and Zecharia Sitchin’s various fantasies and overlaps rather heavily with a 2013 episode that was similarly devoted to Sumerians and the Anunnaki. Of course, back in those wild days, before Ancient Aliens became an adjunct to Congress, they would make wild claims, like Jason Martell accusing the U.S. government of invading Iraq and looting museums to suppress alien evidence. Now, with the respectability afforded by government patronage, we get a mostly boring hour of forgettable televisual wallpaper.

Segment 1
Over the course of 15 years, Ancient Aliens has always had difficulty distinguishing the Sumerians from other, later Mesopotamian peoples, particularly the Babylonians. They are getting a little better, and in the first segment, which gives a potted history of Mesopotamia, they actually identify each civilization separately. The show then outlines the nineteenth-century discovery of the Sumerian language and culture, including the discovery of tablets and statues bearing Sumerian cuneiform inscriptions. And we start to go off the rails when the show fails to define “civilization,” leading to the claim that the Sumerians were the earliest civilization in the world and that they somehow vanished with little trace. This, of course, undercuts the show’s own propositions that Göbekli Tepe represents the earliest civilization, or that a “lost” civilization like Atlantis predated all others by thousands of years. Whoever wrote this summary of Sumerian culture seems to be working off of a middle twentieth century textbook, since they repeat outdated ideas and seem to have little knowledge of current developments.
 
The show claims that no one knows who the Sumerians were, where they came from, or how they developed “the world’s first civilization” practically overnight. These are all standard lines from fringe history books, which in turn reflect outdated scholarly ideas from a century ago. Indeed, the most recent scholarship the show cites is from 1928. It is true that there is no consensus on the lands from which he Sumerians migrated, but there are several plausible contenders; nor is it true that Sumerian culture emerged all at once fully formed, though the earliest phases likely belong to whatever land they came from rather than where they later settled.
 
Segment 2
The second segment discusses cuneiform writing, clay tablets, and the invention of writing, including the Victorian-era decipherment of first Babylonian cuneiform and the subsequent decipherment of Sumerian inscriptions in the twentieth century. This leads to a discussion of the creation myth, the Enuma Elish, which is not Sumerian but Babylonian. A Sitchin-influenced false description of its contents follows. The poem is not a story about the Anunnaki founding civilization, nor are the Anunnaki beings who “fell” from the “sky.” The Anunnaki are merely the collective name for the divine chorus of minor gods above and below; the creation myth is concerned with specific, named great gods, who are not Anunnaki. The show conflates the Anunnaki with all of the gods, and Sumerian stories with Babylonian stories. After this, Irving Finkel lowers himself once again to appear on this shitshow to honor himself for translating a variant of the Flood myth in 2014 that was a thousand years older than the Biblical Flood narrative. (The show identifies this as a Sumerian section of the Gilgamesh narrative, but the actual tablet is a Babylonian account likely earlier than the Gilgamesh recension.) Hugh Newman misrepresents the Mesopotamian Flood myth as involving Anunnaki gods giving knowledge to restart civilization; the story instead had the Flood-hero Xisuthrus (or Atrahasis, or Untanpishtim, or whichever version you prefer) bury preexisting pre-Flood knowledge and dig it back up after the Flood.
 
Segment 3
The third segment involves the “alternative translations” of Zecharia Sitchin, including his fantastical claims about the Anunnaki. I think we’re all familiar with Sitchin’s claims that the Anunnaki came down from the wandering planet Nibiru, created humanity to mine gold for them, and gave the Sumerians civilization. Again the show conflates stories from various Mesopotamian cultures, since the original texts refer to the great sages like Oannes, not the Anunnaki, and involved the fish-sage giving knowledge to whoever originated the version consulted, whether that be the Sumerians at Uruk in Gilgamesh or the Babylonians in Berossus. Michio Kaku humiliates himself by seeming to claim that Sitchin was right and a Nibiru-like Planet X really does visit our solar system every 3,600 years. The show asserts that a change in human DNA thousands of years ago is a marker of Anunnaki genetic engineering, a claim that finds no support in the original texts, which involve the gods beheading one of their number and making the first human from the god’s boiled blood and some other ingredients. No version of the creation myth says anything about altering preexisting beings.
 
Segment 4
The fourth segment opens with the discovery of a temple of the god Ningirsu at Lagesh, built by King Gudea after a vision of the god in bird form. Giorgio Tsoukalos says the bird was a spaceship. The other talking heads call it by the Native American name of thunderbird (also used in many translations of Gilgamesh), and then Amir Hussain, a professor of theology, calls it a rocket. The show cites Gilgamesh’s Tablet IV dream that a thunderbird breathed fire and a separate dream about a storm and earthquake in heaven and conflates them, using Sitchin’s false translations, to claim the gods flew in rockets, and then they discuss Sitchin’s claim that Baalbeck was Ningirsu’s landing pad. The original of that claim comes from Soviet propaganda by Matest M. Agrest, who first made the claim before Soviet authorities fed it to ancient astronaut writers, starting with the authors of Morning of the Magicians.  
 
Segment 5
The fifth segment reviews discoveries made at Ur and discusses the connection between Ur and the Biblical hometown of Abraham. The show discusses Leonard Woolley’s belief that evidence of a flood there was proof of the Biblical Flood, though the show offers no evidence and omits Woolley’s conclusion that this “flood” was not a universal alien-induced cataclysm but merely a local flood affecting mostly Ur. Instead, they quickly move on to Zecharia Sitchin’s allegation that the remains of “Queen” (her rank is disputed) Puabi found at Ur displayed “alien” traits, and the show suggests a conspiracy by academics to prevent DNA testing to “prove” she was an Anunnaki-human alien hybrid.
 
Segment 6
The final segment features Newman telling us that the Sumerians came from a submerged lost land, possibly located off Israel. The show tries to tie “Sumerian” stories of a “pre-Flood civilization” to various ancient ruins, including Göbekli Tepe, despite the fact this contradicts their earlier claim to Sumerian civilizational primacy, and despite the fact hat the myths clearly relate that the “pre-Flood civilization” was indeed the same as the post-Flood one, for the same cities were drowned and then repopulated. Instead, the show ignores this and says that handbags prove the Sumerians came from Göbekli Tepe because no one could have independently developed the idea of carrying stuff around in a bag. Only aliens would have such a genius idea as… a bag.