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Have you ever stopped to think about what happened to an entire civilization for them to simply vanish from the world? I'm not talking about a city that was destroyed. I'm talking about a language, a way of praying, of farming,
Explores the disappearance of the Sumerians, the ancient astronaut theory of Zecharia Sitchin, and what archaeology and genetics actually reveal about Mesopotamian civilization.
Key Takeaways
- The Sumerians did not vanish; their language and culture gradually faded, and their population likely contributed to later Mesopotamian peoples.
- The ancient astronaut theory of Zecharia Sitchin is popular but is not supported by Assyriologists, who read the texts as mythology.
- Sumerian contributions such as writing, the 60-minute hour, and early law codes are well documented by scholarship.
- Genetics and archaeology provide evidence of continuity in the region rather than mass migration to distant continents.
What the video covers
- Introduces the Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), their citystates, and their achievements such as cuneiform writing and the base-60 counting system.
- Explains how the 19th-century rediscovery of Sumerian civilization began with excavations at Nineveh and the library of Assyrian king Ashurbanipal.
- Describes the debate over whether Sumerian was a real language, with scholars like Jules Oppert and Joseph Halévy disagreeing.
- Presents the Sumerian texts commonly cited by theorists, including the king lists, flood myths, and the lamentations over destroyed cities.
- Profiles Zecharia Sitchin and his Earth Chronicles, which claim the Sumerian gods were the Anunnaki, extraterrestrials from a planet called Nibiru.
- Outlines Sitchin's claims about a Sinai spaceport, nuclear conflict, and the creation of humans through genetic engineering.
- Presents scholarly rebuttals: Assyriologists read the texts as religious mythology, and the 'twelfth planet' reading is a mistranslation or misreading.
- Discusses genetic and archaeological studies suggesting Sumerians were not wiped out but their descendants and related populations persisted in the region.
- Emphasizes that no single tablet states where the Sumerians were taken; the claim rests on interpretive readings of a set of texts.
- Invites viewers to weigh the ancient astronaut theory against expert evidence and draw their own conclusions.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: The Mystery of the Vanished Sumerians
- 03:04Who the Sumerians Were and Their Cities
- 07:03Cuneiform Writing and Sumerian Achievements
- 16:40Rediscovery and the Debate Over the Sumerian Language
- 27:40Zecharia Sitchin and the Anunnaki Theory
- 45:30Expert Rebuttals and Assyriological Readings of the Texts
- 60:00Genetic and Archaeological Evidence of Continuity
- 81:40Conclusions: Weighing the Theories
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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of counting the hours that was there one day and a few centuries later was gone.
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That's right. With the Sumerians, that is exactly what happened. Some ancient astronaut theorists say the Sumerianss were taken by the gods themselves back to a distant planet that crosses our solar system from time to time. Others say they migrated on mass to the other
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side of the world and gave rise to peoples who still exist today in India, in Japan, in Europe. Some swear they never disappeared at all, that they just changed their name.
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And in this video, we are going to find out where the Sumerians were taken, what a very controversial theory says about it, and what science has really found inside these clay tablets.
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It's so good to be together to investigate this mystery. I hope everything is well with you and you are always very welcome here on the channel.
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Before we begin, I would love to know your opinion on this subject. So, leave your like and your comment. I will read every single one of them. Today we are going to do something different. Instead of picking a side, we are going to
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listen to both. We will understand what the people who believe the Sumerian tablets hold an extraordinary secret are saying. And then we will put that theory face to face with what experts, archaeologists, and even geneticists have already discovered. In the end, you
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draw your own conclusions and see which side makes more sense to you. Deal? Then let's go. First, we need to understand who we are talking about. The Sumerianss lived in the south of the region that is now Iraq on the open plane between two
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great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Later, the Greeks gave this region a name, Mesopotamia, which means more or less the land between rivers.
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Today it is a dry, dusty landscape of ruins shaped like hills. But about 5,000 years ago, it was one of the busiest places on the planet. That is where cities like Eridu, Uruk, Lagash, Nepur, and Kish stood. Each one with its own
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king, its own protector god, its temples and its walls. The Sumerianss were never a unified nation in the sense we understand today. They were several citystates that shared the same language and the same culture and that were constantly fighting each other over
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water, land, and prestige. They called their own land Kangar, something like the country of the noble lords. And they called themselves something that still gives chills to anyone who reads it, the blackheaded ones. No one knows for sure why. It may
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have been because of their hair, or it may have been a symbolic expression. What we do know is that when a Sumerian wanted to say we the people, that is what he said. Now, what they did in these cities is what is truly
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impressive. Around 3,300 before Christ in the city of Uruk, the first written texts we know of appeared.
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They were marks made in soft clay with a reed cut to a point. At first they were simple drawings to record how many sheep, how many sacks of barley, how much beer, accounting basically.
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Over time these drawings turned into wedgehaped signs. That is why the writing became known as ununiform which comes from the Latin word for wedge.
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And from that accounting writing kept growing. Hymns, contracts, letters, lists of kings, prayers, proverbs, and stories of gods and heroes appeared.
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Within a few centuries, the Sumerianss already had schools, which they called tablet houses, where boys learned to copy signs until they got them right.
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They were also the ones who developed a counting system based on the number 60.
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Sounds strange? Well, you use it every day. It is because of them that your hour has 60 minutes and your minute has 60 seconds. And the circle divided into 360° also carries that heritage.
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An American scholar named Samuel Noah Kramer spent his whole life studying these tablets and wrote a famous book whose title says it all. History begins at Sumemer. In it he listed dozens of firsts that according to him came from
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that place. The first schools, the first written laws, the first libraries, the first laments over destroyed cities, even the first proverbs.
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Huge cities for their time. Uruk, for example, came to have tens of thousands of inhabitants and according to estimates, about 9 km of walls.
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Now, notice something. All of this happened 5,000 years ago. And yet, for almost 2,000 years after that time, no one in the modern world knew that the Sumerians had even existed.
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That's right. Their memory was buried under mounds of earth in the desert. The Bible speaks of a region called Shenar, and the Greeks speak of a legendary Babylon, but no one remembered a civilization called Sumere.
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The rediscovery began in the 19th century when European explorers started excavating the ruins of Nineveh in the north of present-day Iraq. There they found the library of an Assyrian king named Asher Banipal with tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments
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covered in ununiform writing. Scholars managed to decipher much of this writing. It was a Semitic language that became known as Aadian. But among these tablets, there was something that made no sense. Some texts were written in another completely different
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language. And the most curious thing is that the Assyrian scribes themselves treated this language as something ancient and sacred and made vocabulary lists translating what it said. In 1869, a French scholar named Jeel Opera proposed giving this mysterious language
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a name, Sumerian. And that's when the confusion started because the idea that there was a people older than the Babylonians who spoke a language unrelated to any other and who had invented writing seemed far too absurd. Another French scholar, Joseph
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Halvie, even argued that Sumerian was not a real language at all. For him, it was a kind of secret code invented by Semitic priests. For years, this was a serious debate. But the excavations continued and tablets written in
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Sumerian kept turning up in Nepur, in Lagash, in Ur, tens of thousands of them. Today this language is studied at universities all over the world and there is even a large online database maintained by the University of Oxford
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with thousands of Sumerian texts translated into English. It is from this collection that many people, including the authors of the theories we are about to see, build their arguments.
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And here I need to make an important clarification because the title of the video promises a deciphered scripture.
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There is no single tablet, no single piece that says in so many words where the Sumerianss were taken.
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What exists is a set of texts, a lament over the fall of a list of kings that begins with kingship descending from heaven, myths about the flood, stories of heroes who rise into the sky. And there is a way of reading these texts
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created and popularized by an author named Zechariah Sitchin, which claims they are literal accounts of an ancient visit to our planet. It is this reading that the title calls a deciphered scripture.
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This theory is worth getting to know up close. Even if you don't believe any of it, it is one of the most fascinating stories ever told from a handful of clay. Sitchin was born in 1920 in the Caucasus. Grew up in the Middle East and
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according to himself learned Hebrew and ancient languages from an early age. He worked most of his life for a shipping company and it was by studying on his own that he delved into coform. In 1976 he published a book called the 12th
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planet which became a bestseller and launched a series of books he called the earth chronicles.
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The central idea was bold for him. The Sumerian gods were not gods. They were beings of flesh and blood coming from a planet he called Nibberu. These beings would have arrived on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, would have
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created humanity, and would have taught the Sumerians everything they knew. If this is true, the question in the title takes on a whole other dimension.
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Because if the gods were real, then they may have left. And if they left, what happened to the people they left behind?
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Or who knows, to those they took with them? It is an idea that gives you chills.
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But before we get there and before we put the theory on the scale, I want to start with what is hardest to dispute with what is actually written in the clay. Because to understand what is interpretation and what is record, we
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first need to see the tablets. And there is one of them, just one, in which someone is in fact taken far away.
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It is not a god. It is not an alien. It is a king. And what happened to him is the first mystery of this investigation.
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Part two, the king who was taken. Let's go back to understand how such a powerful city came to be invaded. We need to go back about 100 years before 2004 before Christ.
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Around 2,112, a king named Uramu took control of much of southern Mesopotamia and founded what historians call the third dynasty of Ur.
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It was a kind of Sumerian renaissance. After centuries dominated by Semitic speaking kings like the famous Sargon of Akad, the Sumerianss were once again ruling the region. Uramu ordered the construction of an enormous ziggurat, that kind of step temple, dedicated to
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the moon god Nana, the protector of the city. And he had a set of laws compiled that is still considered the oldest written legal code known centuries before the famous code of Hammurabi.
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The dynasty had five kings, Uramu, Shuli, Amarin, Shusine, and last of all, Ibisin. Remember that name because he is the protagonist of this part of the story.
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Ibisin came to the throne around 2028 before Christ and inherited an empire that was already cracking from within.
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Nomadic peoples from the west, the Amorites, were pressing on the borders. The more distant provinces began to rebel, and to make matters worse, the city began to suffer from famine.
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There are letters preserved on tablets exchanged between the king and his officials that describe this moment of desperation.
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Some historians believe that part of these letters may actually be a literary exercise written later, but they portray a situation that matches the rest of the evidence. According to them, the price of grain skyrocketed. The population went hungry and a high official named
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Ishba was sent to buy grain. But Ishb era instead of coming back with the food used the situation to his own advantage.
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He settled in the city of Een and began to rule on his own. The empire was falling apart. And then in 2004 before Christ, the final blow came. An army made up of troops from Alam, a region to
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the east in present-day Iran, together with allies from a neighboring region called Shimashki, marched on Ur. Leading the invasion was a king named Kindatu Urfell.
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The city was looted, the temple was attacked, and Ibisin, the last king of the dynasty, was captured and taken prisoner.
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This is where the question in the title comes in. Where did they take the king?
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According to the Sumerian text that tells these events, he was taken to Anan, a city in the territory of Alam in a distant place far from everything he knew. What we know for sure is that he was captured and never returned to the
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throne. This is the only case in which we have in writing a Sumerian literally being taken to a specific place.
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And the text that tells this story is one of the most impressive works of ancient literature.
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It is called the lament for suma and it is a poem of 519 lines written shortly after the fall of the city and it belongs to a genre that scholars call city laments.
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This genre was so important in Mesopotamia that at least five great examples have come down to us. The lament for Aridu, the one for Uruk, the one for Nepur, the lament over the destruction of Ur, and this one for
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Sumer and Ur. They all share a curious pattern. The protector god of the city abandons the temple. The greater gods decide to destroy it. The city suffers and in the end, after much weeping, the deity returns and the city is restored.
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Keep in mind that this is just one way of telling the story. From the Samrian's point of view, it made no sense for such an important city to fall without the god's permission. So the explanation had to be divine. In the
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poem, the goddess Ningal, wife of the moon god, begs the great gods to spare Ur. They are Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Ninma, and they say no.
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The text describes a terrible devastation. It speaks of people dead in the streets, of empty temples, of hunger, of abandoned fields, and it speaks of a storm that sweeps across the land at the command of one of the gods.
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Can you imagine what went through the mind of whoever wrote that? People who saw the city where they were born turn into ruins.
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Now this is where the story changes tone because starting in the 70s and 80s an author began to propose that the storm described in the poem was not a metaphor.
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Zechariah Sitchin in a book called the wars of gods and men argued that the destruction of was connected to a much bigger event. According to him what the text describes as an evil storm would actually be the account of a nuclear
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explosion. a weapon used by the gods themselves in a war between factions which would have contaminated the region and killed the Samrians.
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I know it sounds absurd but it is worth paying attention to the reasoning. Sitchin linked this event to a date 2024 before Christ about 20 years before the date accepted by historians for the fall of but with a
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connection he considered essential. For him, this was the same moment when, according to the Bible, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.
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And there is a detail that sends a shiver down your spine. According to the Bible itself, the patriarch Abraham, the one who leaves home and goes to an unknown land, was born precisely in a city called of the Chaldes.
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For the supporters of this theory, it is no coincidence. Abraham's family would have left there shortly before the catastrophe.
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Sitchin even suggested that there was a spaceport on the Sinai Peninsula and that the nuclear explosion was set off to destroy it. It sounds like a movie plot, but it is a theory that sold millions of books. And what do the
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experts say? Assyriologists, the researchers who study these tablets, say that the storm in the poem is a common image in Mesopotamian literature. In their language, it was used as a symbol of an overwhelming divine force capable of sweeping away everything in its path.
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In the minds of the Sumerians, an invasion could only be understood as a storm sent by the gods.
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In addition, the archaeologists who excavated found signs of destruction and reoccupation, but as far as we know, no trace of radiation, craters, or melted rock resembling an atomic explosion has ever been published.
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Supporters reply that this is exactly what you would expect after 4,000 years and that no one has looked with the proper instruments.
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True or not, does this mean the explanation is not settled? For the skeptics, no. For the enthusiasts, the door remains open.
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But there is one point on which both sides agree. Ur did not disappear. The city recovered. Ishb era, the rebel official, drove the Elommites out of the region.
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The city remained inhabited for centuries under other kings. The Sumerian language continued to be written. And the Sumerianss as people were not taken on mass anywhere.
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What was taken was power. What was taken was the king. And this realization that the people were not dragged off as a crowd to another world forces us to look at the question in a different way.
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Maybe the question is not where the Samarans were taken. Maybe the right question is why do so many people want to believe they were? Is there something in these tablets that really speaks of people being taken from one place to
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another? There is. And curiously, the destination of those who were taken in these stories is not an enemy city. It is the sky.
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Before we get there, let me tell you something. To understand what the Sumerianss meant when they talked about their gods, we need to go back to a time when, according to them, cities did not even exist.
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A time when kingship was still in heaven. And that is where the mystery gets really strange.
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Part three, when kingship descended from heaven. In 1922 in southern Iraq, excavators working in the ruins of the ancient city of Larsa found a strange object.
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It was a prism of baked clay with four sides roughly the size of a forearm covered in puniform writing. It was taken to England and today it is in the Asholian Museum in Oxford. It became known as the Weld Blundle Prism in honor
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of the collector who bought it. Scholars soon realized that it was the most complete version of a document they already knew in pieces, the Sumerian king list.
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The piece was made around 1800 before Christ, but it copies much older texts and it begins with a sentence that to this day makes many people stop and think. It says in short that after kingship descended from heaven, kingship
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was in Eridu. Stop for a moment on that sentence. Kingship descended from heaven. For the Sumerianss, the power to rule was not a human invention. It was a gift that came from above. And the place where that gift landed, so to speak, was the city
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of Aridu in the far south near what was then the coast of the Gulf. Eridu, by the way, is a fascinating place.
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Archaeologists found a sequence of temples there, one built on top of the other over about 1,600 years. The Sumerians believed it was the oldest city in the world, and the excavations show they were not that far off. It really was one of the oldest
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settlements in the region. And the king list goes on. After that sentence, it presents the first kings. The first is called Alulim and he reigned for 28,800 years. The second Algar reigned for 36,000 years. Adding up the eight kings
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who ruled before the flood, the list reaches a total of 241,200 years of rain. You heard that right, more than 200,000 years.
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Then the text says that a flood came and swept everything away and that once again kingship descended from heaven and ended up in another city, Kish. That is when the reigns start to shrink. At first they are still long, hundreds of
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years, but as the list goes on, they get closer to human time spans. Names appear that archaeologists can confirm in inscriptions from that period. Even the hero Gilgamesh appears, king of Uruk, the very same one from the epic stories.
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Historians see the king list as a mixture of history and myth. The oldest part is legendary. The most recent part is, for the most part, real history, and the purpose of the document was political, to show that every legitimate
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king descended from a line that began in heaven. But the supporters of the ancient astronaut theory see something else.
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They point to a mathematical detail. In Sumerian writing, the years of reign of the first kings are counted in a unit called Assar. One Sar is worth 3,600.
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Alulim reigned eight SARS and Algar reigned 10. Sitchin argued that this is no accident. For him, 3,600 is exactly the length of the orbit of the planet Nibiru, and each reign would be a count of that planet's passages.
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It is an ingenious idea. Experts, on the other hand, point out that the Sumerian number system was based on the number 60 and that 3,600 is simply 60 * 60. SARS appear in many other counts with no connection
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whatsoever to astronomy. It was the way scribes expressed very large numbers and gave the first kings an almost divine prestige.
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Of course, this does not end the conversation because those who believe in Sitchin can reply, "And why would the scribes have chosen precisely these numbers?" The question remains, but the king list is not the only text that speaks of a time before history.
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There are others and they feature people who do not die, people who are taken.
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Let's look at four of them. The first is Adapa. According to the myths, Adapa was a wise man from Aridu. He was one of the so-called Abcalu, the seven sages who supposedly taught humanity the arts of civilization, agriculture writing construction
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medicine, music. Tradition described them as figures linked to the god Anki, the lord of the deep waters and of wisdom.
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One day, Adapa was fishing when the south wind capsized his boat. Furious, he cursed the wind and broke one of its wings. The supreme god Anu, noticing that the wind had stopped blowing, ordered the man to be brought before him
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in heaven. Before going up, Adapa received a warning from his protector, Enki. Do not accept the food or the water they offer you up there because they are the food of death.
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Adapa obeyed, but what they offered him was actually the food of eternal life. By following Enki's advice, he refused it and lost his chance to become immortal. He was sent back to Earth as an ordinary man. A sad and curious
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story. And notice he was taken to heaven and he came back. The second is Itana.
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Itana was a king of Kish, the very one who appears in the king list right after the flood. The list says of him that he ascended to heaven. He had no children and desperately wanted an heir.
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According to the myth, he asked an eagle for help and the bird carried him on its back up to the heights where he could ask the goddess Ishtar for the plant of birth. Ancient astronaut theorists say this eagle would have been a spacecraft.
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Experts say the eagle is a classic symbol of power and of a connection with the divine common in many cultures and that the myth shows the idea that the king being chosen by the gods has access to heaven.
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The third is Zudra. Zeusra is the Sumerian hero of the flood. He is a kind of Noah much older than the biblical Noah. The gods decided to destroy humanity. But the god Enki secretly warned Zeusra, told him to
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build a giant boat and he survived the flood. And now comes the important part for our investigation.
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According to the Sumerian text, after the flood, the gods granted Zusudra eternal life and made him live in a distant land called Dilmun, the place where the sun rises.
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In other words, in the Sumerian tradition, there is indeed someone who was taken by the gods to live in another place, and that place has a name.
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Scholars believe Dilman was a real land linked to the island of Bahrain and to the regions of the Persian Gulf, which worked as a great center of trade. But in the myths, it became a paradise, a clean place with no disease, no old age,
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no death. Could the story of Dilman be the distorted memory of a place where some group was really taken or just the dream of a people who knew they were going to die? The fourth is a name you
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may already know by another route. Endedurani. He was a king of a city called the seventh on his list. According to Babylonian texts, the gods Shamash and Adad took him to the divine assembly and taught him the art of divination, which
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he later passed on to his descendants. Seventh on the list, taken by the gods.
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Does that remind you of anything? Bible scholars noticed a troubling similarity a long time ago. In the biblical tradition, the patriarch Enoch is also the seventh in a lineage. And the Bible says he walked with God and then was no more because God took him.
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Many researchers see a link between the two figures and between the Abcalu and the so-called watchers, the angels of the apocryphal book of Enoch.
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Does this mean that the people who wrote the Bible knew these myths? Very probably, yes. The literatures touched each other. The Hebrews spent centuries in contact with Babylon and Babylon inherited everything from the Sumerianss.
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And here is the point I want you to keep in mind. In all of these stories, the one who is taken is not the people. It is a special person, a sage, a king, a hero, someone who by merit or by luck
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crosses a border that no one crosses. And there is always the same pattern. Knowledge comes from above. The sages who teach civilization, the kings who receive power from heaven, the hero who escapes the flood and is rewarded with
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eternity. There is even a halffish version of these sages. A Babylonian priest named Barasus around the year 290 before Christ wrote in Greek that in the beginning a creature that was half man and half fish called Oanes came out of
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the sea during the day to teach humans writing mathematics and agriculture. At dusk he went back into the water.
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For researchers, it is a legend about the Abcalu sages who in images sometimes appear dressed as fish. For ancient astronaut theorists, it is a memory of beings from another world wearing special suits who came out of a craft
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that had landed on the water. Who is right? Once again, we cannot say for sure. Now, what about the flood? Was it real? In 1929, the British archaeologist Leonard Woolly, who was excavating, dug a deep shaft and found a layer of clean
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mud about 2 and 1/2 m thick without a single object between two layers of human occupation.
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He announced that he had found proof of the biblical flood. The news went around the world. Years later, other archaeologists showed that this layer did not appear at every site and that it did not correspond to a global flood.
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They were probably local floods common on a plane crossed by two immense rivers. But the memory of great floods remained and it fed the stories that later became the basis of the traditions of many peoples.
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We now reach the point where the question stops being about what is written and becomes about how to read it.
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Because all the characters we have seen so far, the sages, the kings, the heroes have a link to the same group of beings, the gods. And in some tablets, these gods are given a collective name, a name that became famous all over the world.
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Anunnaki. That name is going to change everything we see from here on. But before we get to it, I need to introduce you to a man.
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A man who spent almost his entire life trying to prove that these gods were in fact among us and who almost managed to convince the whole world. Part four, the theory of the 12th planet.
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Zechariah Sitchin died in 2010 at the age of 90. But until the end of his life, he swore he had solved the greatest riddle in human history. His theory fits in a few lines, but it needs to be told calmly because each piece
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fits into the next. And I'm going to present it the way its supporters present it without skipping any part. So you understand why so many people were enchanted by it. The starting point is the sky. According to Sitchin, our solar
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system has one more planet, a large planet that spends most of its time far away on the dark edges of space. and that every 3,600 years approaches the sun, making an immense elongated loop. The Sumerians would have called it Nibiru.
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That name for him meant something like the planet of the crossing. He called it the 12th planet because he counted the sun and the moon as if they were planets along with the other 10.
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This count is one of the most criticized parts, but it is part of the package.
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According to Sitchin, this story was hidden in a very famous Babylonian text, the Enuma Elish, which tells of the creation of the world. For most scholars, it is a religious and political poem that explains how the god Marduk became the king of the gods after
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defeating the monster goddess Tiiamat. For Sitchin, it was a disguised astronomical account. Tiiamat would have been an ancient planet that was struck by one of Nibiru's moons. The collision would have split the planet in two. One half became the Earth. The other became
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the asteroid belt, which he called the hammered bracelet. I know it sounds absurd, but notice how tightly the idea is tied together. The name of the planet, the creation story, and the existence of a belt of rocks that really does exist between Mars and
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Jupiter. It is a narrative that makes you want to believe. Now comes the part about living beings.
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According to him, the planet Nibiru was inhabited by a very advanced civilization. The Sumerians called them the Anunnaki. Sitchin translated the name as those who from heaven to earth came.
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And why would they have come? Because of gold. According to him, Nibiru's atmosphere was deteriorating, and the Anunnaki needed gold particles to protect the planet's air. About 450,000 years ago, they would have arrived on Earth and set up a base in the Persian
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Gulf, where the city of Eridu would have been born. See the connection? The first city of the King list, the city where kingship descended from heaven.
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The leaders of this expedition were according to Sitchin the very gods of mythology. Anu was the king who stayed on Nibiru.
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His son Enlil was the commander of the mission. And his half-brother Enki was the scientist and engineer, the one who mastered the waters and knowledge. A goddess named Ninhers would have been the chief medical officer. Over time, the gold mining, which according to
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Sitchin took place in southeastern Africa, became too heavy. And this is the part that fascinates readers the most. The lower ranking Anunnaki, tired of the work, rebelled.
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This, by the way, really is written down. There is an Acadian poem called Atrahasis that tells how the lesser gods were forced to dig canals and work without rest until one day they burned their tools and surrounded the house of
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the god Enlil on strike. To solve the problem, the great gods decide to create a new creature that would do the work in their place. Enki and the goddess Ninhersag mix clay with the blood of a sacrificed god and that
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is how the human being is born. For most scholars, this is a myth about the meaning of human work. For Sitchin, it was a literal account of genetic engineering.
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According to him, the Anunnaki mixed their own genetic material with that of one of our ancestors, Homo Erectus, and created Homo sapiens as a kind of worker. Humanity in this version is a laboratory project.
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You can see why the book sold so well. And what does this have to do with the Sumerians?
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Everything. In Sitchin's reading, Sumerian civilization did not emerge little by little as happens with normal peoples.
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It appeared all at once, complete with writing, temples, laws, and mathematics. And that would be proof that someone taught them. The Anunnaki would have been the teachers, the upcall sages, the kings who received power from heaven.
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the characters who visit the sky. All of that would be memories of real contact.
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And when the gods at some point went away, Sumere would have collapsed, hence the destruction of which we saw in the previous part, hence the disappearance of the people. Hence the title of this video. Sitchin also presented evidence
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he called visual. The most famous is a cylinder seal kept in a museum in Berlin known by the code VA243.
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On it, we see a group of small circles around a large star with many points.
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For him, that was a map of the solar system with 12 bodies, including the planet Nibberu, and it would prove that the Sumerianss knew of planets that only modern science would discover later.
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Uranus was discovered in 1781. Neptune in 1846, Pluto in 1930. How could the Sumerianss have known about this? That was the question Sitchin left hanging in the air. Take a breath because I know it's a lot. Now, let's go to the other side of
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the scale. What do the experts say? Sitchin's main critic was an American scholar named Michael Heiser, a doctor in ancient Semitic languages. He spent years analyzing Sitchin's translations and created an entire website pointing out what he considered errors. Heiser's
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first argument is simple. He used the database of Sumerian texts I mentioned earlier, the one from the University of Oxford, and counted how many times the word Anunnaki appears. It was 182 times.
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And in none of them according to him are the Anunnaki linked to a planet called Nibiru to a 12th planet or to space technology.
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The second is about the translation of the name. According to Heiser and other researchers, Anunnaki means something like royal offspring, children of princes. It does not mean those who from heaven to earth came. For the critics, this specific translation simply does
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not appear in ancient texts and would be the product of Sitchin's own work. The third is about Nibiru. In Babylonian texts, Nibiru is a name associated with a star or with a crossing point in the sky, and it is often identified with the
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planet Jupiter, which was Marduk's planet. There is nothing in the texts about an orbit of 3,600 years.
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The fourth is about the planets. Mesopotamian astronomers were excellent observers, but they only knew the five planets visible to the naked eye.
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Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter and Saturn. There is no text showing that they knew of the existence of any other.
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The fifth is about the Berlin seal. For the critics, the central body is not the sun. They say that in hundreds of other images, the sun appears differently with six or eight points and that the image on the seal could represent a cluster of
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stars or some deity or the 12 members of the council of the gods, not a map of the solar system.
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And the sixth is about Sitchin's own training. He taught himself ununiform while working in another profession. His critics say this led to basic errors of grammar and vocabulary and that you would have to translate in a very forced
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way to arrive at his conclusions. As for the creation of human beings, Assyriologists say the text speaks of clay and the blood of a god which is a classic religious image. There is nothing that suggests genetic manipulation in the modern sense.
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And there is a criticism of another kind. Some researchers point out that the idea that ancient peoples could not have built their civilizations on their own and that they would have needed outside help carries a built-in prejudice. It would be a way, even if
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unintentional, of diminishing the ability of peoples who did extraordinary things with the resources they had. Of course, the story doesn't end there because Sitchin supporters have an answer. They say Heiser was a devout Christian and that this led him to
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interpret the texts in a way that fit his faith and that he ignored passages that bothered him. An independent researcher cited the same Oxford database to show that the Anunnaki appear associated with the name Nibiru with some frequency in certain texts.
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That does not prove Nibiru is a planet, but it shows that things are not as simple as the critics claim. And there is one more point. Some impartial analysts acknowledge that not all of Sichin's claims have been refuted with
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the same firmness. Some of the strongest criticisms deal with specific details, such as the translation of the name Anunnaki.
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Others, such as the idea that creation myths may hide memories of real events, depend more on interpretation than on proof.
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It is a debate that continues. And the planet, does it exist? Here, science is very direct. No telescope has ever found a planet of the size and with the orbit that Sichin described. If such a large body passed close to the Earth
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every 3,600 years, it would have left visible marks on the orbits of other planets and comets.
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In fact, there was a wave of panic because of this. In the '90s, an American woman named Nancy Leer said that beings from another planet had warned her that a celestial body was going to collide with the Earth. She set
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a date, the year 2003, and then the date was pushed back to 2012 when it coincided with the Mayan calendar. The story spread across the internet, and NASA had to publish explanations to calm people down.
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Nothing happened. But curiously, serious astronomy has a more modest version of this story. In 2016, two American astronomers proposed that a very distant planet about 10 times more massive than the Earth could be hidden beyond Neptune and that this
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would explain the strange behavior of some frozen bodies on the edges of the solar system. It is the so-called planet 9 hypothesis.
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As far as we know, it has never been observed directly. It has nothing to do with the Anunnaki.
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The orbit is different, the size is different, and the proposal does not come from clay tablets, but from calculations, but it is a good example to show how every now and then the universe holds things we have not yet
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seen. And there lies the impass. On one side, a theory that explains a lot in a beautiful way, but that depends on disputed translations and on evidence no one has been able to find. On the other, a solid academic explanation, but
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one that leaves part of the mystery unanswered. Which part? The most basic of all?
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Because whether you believe in Sitchin or not, there is a question that neither side can answer comfortably. A question that has been bothering researchers ever since the Sumerian language was discovered.
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Where did the Sumerians come from? If there is a gap in the conventional explanation, that is where the theory of the gods from the sky finds its space.
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And that is what we are going to see now. Part five, the true mystery and the conclusion.
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Scholars call this riddle the Sumerian problem. And it starts with the language. Sumerian does not resemble any other known language. It is not Semitic like Hebrew, Arabic and Acadian. It is not Indo-Uropean like Greek, Latin and Portuguese. It is what linguists call a
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language isolate, a language with no proven relatives. And it works in a particular way. Instead of changing the endings of words, it keeps sticking pieces together one after another like Lego bricks. Imagine speaking a language and not being able to show that it has a
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single cousin in the world. There is also a curious detail. Many of the names of the most important Sumerian cities such as Eridu and Uruk do not seem to be Sumerian words. The words for ancient trades such as blacksmith and farmer
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also seem to be borrowed from another language which scholars call a substrate. In other words, before the Samrians, there were already people living there speaking something else.
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When this was discovered, questions arose. Were the Samrians a people who came from outside or were they the heirs of those who were already there? Let's look at the hypothesis.
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The first says they arrived from somewhere in Southwest Asia around 3,300 before Christ and brought the language with them.
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The second says they came down from the mountains of northeastern Mesopotamia and settled in the marshes of the south absorbing the peoples who already lived there. The third says they came from the south from the coast of the Gulf since
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Aridu, the oldest city, lies in that direction. And the fourth says they were always there. That Sumerian was the language of the hunting and fishing peoples who occupied the marshes. and that Sumerian is just the name we give to the way
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these people spoke when writing was invented. There are even those who propose a distant link with North Africa. A genetic study from 2016 which analyzed human remains from very ancient cultures of the Middle East suggested that part of the population of the Levant had
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ancestry linked to Africa. It did not speak directly about the Sumerians, but it fueled this conversation.
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And archaeology, archaeologists found in the region a culture older than the Sumerian one called Ubide. It lasted from about 6,500 to 3,800 before Christ and already had villages, temples, and highquality pottery. When we look at what happened afterwards, there seems to be a
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continuity between this culture and that of Uruk with no signs of a large invasion.
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But that does not solve the question of the language because continuity in objects does not prove continuity in who was speaking.
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Samuel Kramer, the scholar I mentioned at the beginning, argued that the Ubide culture was already advanced when the Sumerianss appeared. In other words, they would have arrived later and inherited much of what already existed.
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But others say the opposite. In short, the experts have not yet reached a consensus.
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And it is in this void that imagination steps in. When science says, "We don't know yet," the theory of the gods from the sky replies, "We know." And that is seductive.
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But genetics can help. In 2011, a team of Italian and Iraqi researchers decided to carry out a curious test. They collected blood samples from 143 men and women of the people who live in the marshes of southern Iraq, the so-called
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marsh Arabs. These people have lived there for centuries with a way of life that closely resembles what the Sumerianss described. Reed houses, boats, buffalo, fishing. Many consider them the most direct descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the region. What
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did they discover? That most of the lineages of these men and women were typical of the Middle East itself and that there is a paternal lineage that expanded in the region precisely at the time of the Sumerian citystates.
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The authors concluded that if these people really descend from the Sumerians, then the Sumerianss were probably native to the region and not of Indian or South Asian origin as had once been proposed.
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Keep in mind that a study of this kind done with people living today does not prove anything with absolute certainty, but it is a clue.
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And in 2025, another study published in the journal Nature analyzed the genome of a man who lived in Egypt about 4,500 years ago at the beginning of the Old Kingdom. Most of his ancestry was North African, but about a fifth came from the
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region of the fertile crescent where Mesopotamia flourished. This confirms that the two worlds, that of the Nile and that of the two rivers, exchanged not only ideas and goods, but also people. As far as I know, there is still
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no Sumerian genome securely identified as the typical Sumerian. It is an open space, and much bolder theories fill this void. Some try to link Sumerian to the Dravidian languages of southern India. Some try to link it to Hungarian,
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to Turkish, to Basque, to Japanese. Over more than a century, dozens of relationships have been suggested. None has been accepted by the experts because the similarities may be coincidence or far from systematic.
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But this shows something interesting. The riddle of the Sumerianss is so fascinating that it has produced a different explanation for every culture that wanted to see itself in it. And now we come to the final question. If the
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Samrians were not taken by gods and were not taken by war, what really happened to them? The answer is less dramatic but perhaps more beautiful.
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They blended in. Around 2,300 before Christ, Sargon of Akad conquered the Sumerian cities and created the first empire in history. The language spoken in government became aian, a smitic language. There was a brief Sumerian renaissance with the dynasty of Urnamu
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that we saw. But after the fall of Ur, the following kings were of Semitic, Amorite and later Babylonian origin.
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Sumerian stopped being spoken in the streets, but that does not mean it disappeared. It remained the language of temples, prayers, and schools.
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Babylonian scribes for almost 2,000 years kept copying texts in Sumerian just as the priests of Europe copied in Latin. They made dictionaries that translated one language into the other.
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That is how in the 19th century we managed to decipher a language that no one had spoken for millennia and the tablets ended up in libraries.
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The one of Asher Banipal in Nineveh around the 7th century before Christ kept copies of texts that were already extremely ancient at that time. Kuniform writing continued to be used for 3,000 years until the first centuries of our
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era. Think about it. The writing invented by the Samrians outlived them by about three millennia.
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So where were the Samrians taken? into everyone who came after them. They were taken to Babylon, which inherited their laws and their religion. They were taken to Assyria, which kept their tablets.
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They were taken to the Bible, which reused their stories of the flood and of heroes who do not die. They were taken to Greece, which heard of fishmen through the voice of a priest named Barasus. and they were taken quite
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literally to your wrist every time you look at your watch and see 60 minutes in an hour. It is a beautiful answer, but perhaps it is not the only one. Because if you think the historical explanation solves everything, it is worth
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remembering one thing. It was built from ruins and fragments. We know only a tiny fraction of what was written. Many Sumerian sites have never been excavated and there are tablets kept in museums for more than a hundred years that are
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still waiting to be translated. So I want to ask you an honest question. What if it's true? What if one day in some corner of Iraq someone finds a clear dated inscription written by Sumerian Hands saying that beings from
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another world were there? What would it take for us to believe it? The inscription would have to be authentic, precisely dated, and several experts would have to translate it independently and reach the same result.
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There would have to be objects, remains, some material trace, and the result would have to be repeatable by other researchers in other places.
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To this day, that has not happened. But it is also not possible to say it will never happen. Science does not work that way. It does not prove that something is impossible. It only says what the evidence shows so far. And what
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the evidence shows so far is that the Sumerianss were an extraordinary people. That they invented writing, schools, cities, the first law codes. That they dreamed of gods who came down from the sky and of heroes who rose up to them.
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and that in the end they disappeared as a people but left a legacy so deep that we still carry it today without realizing it. We may never discover every detail about the end of Sumer. But one thing is certain. When you pick up a
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5,000-year-old clay tablet and read it, you hear the voice of someone who lived, who loved, who was afraid, who looked at the sky and wondered, as we still wonder today, where we come from and where we are going. And perhaps that is the true
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scripture we have not yet finished deciphering. So, what is your conclusion? Do you think the Sumerianss were taken by the gods? Do you think they were absorbed by history? or do you think the answer lies somewhere we have not yet excavated?
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Leave your opinion in the comments because I really want to know what you think. And if you enjoyed the video, give it a like and be sure to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss the next mysteries.
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Thank you so much for your always special company. I'll leave it here for now. See you in the next
Topics:SumeriansMesopotamiaZecharia SitchinAnunnakiNibirucuneiformancient astronautsSumerian languageAncient Iraqarchaeology
