WEBVTT 00:00:03.990 --> 00:00:13.070 static noise effect 00:00:13.353 --> 00:00:25.183 mysterious music 00:00:30.536 --> 00:00:34.536 I've been a preacher for more than 30 years. I've studied and taught through 00:00:34.536 --> 00:00:38.536 the book of Genesis many, many times in churches all around the world 00:00:38.536 --> 00:00:42.536 and I've trained pastors in the skills of interpreting texts 00:00:42.536 --> 00:00:46.316 and it's very clear they're not stories about Gods. 00:00:46.316 --> 00:00:49.766 They're stories about the powerful ones in the Bible. 00:00:49.766 --> 00:00:53.996 And the sky people, the Anunnaki and the Sumerian tablets 00:00:55.826 --> 00:01:08.626 static noise effect 00:01:10.604 --> 00:01:14.521 [Narrator] In 1896 eminent scholar Nathaniel Schmidt 00:01:14.521 --> 00:01:18.964 was fired from his position as Professor of Semitic languages 00:01:18.964 --> 00:01:21.564 at Colgate University NOTE Paragraph 00:01:21.685 --> 00:01:26.735 For eleven years, this American University had enjoyed Nathaniel Schmidt erudition? 00:01:26.735 --> 00:01:28.575 and Semitic Languages 00:01:28.575 --> 00:01:34.115 He delivered numerous courses in Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic , Arabic , Syriac 00:01:34.115 --> 00:01:37.355 and other ancient languages besides 00:01:37.418 --> 00:01:42.028 In fact, Nathaniel Schmidt was one of America's leading scholars in the field 00:01:43.377 --> 00:01:46.567 So why, after eleven years of outstanding achievement 00:01:46.567 --> 00:01:48.840 was he tried for heresy, 00:01:48.840 --> 00:01:52.400 and fired from his tenure in 1896? 00:01:53.328 --> 00:01:56.068 Though a devout Christian and a Baptist pastor 00:01:56.084 --> 00:01:58.534 The authorities considered that his recent 00:01:58.534 --> 00:02:01.373 theological papers had struck at the very roots 00:02:01.373 --> 00:02:03.433 of two world religions 00:02:03.873 --> 00:02:06.133 Christianity and Judaism. 00:02:07.125 --> 00:02:09.655 What Nathaniel Schmidt had done wrong 00:02:09.655 --> 00:02:12.755 was read the Sumerian and Babylonian 00:02:12.755 --> 00:02:16.595 and Assyrian text and notice that they were full 00:02:16.595 --> 00:02:20.755 of fascinating parallels. Stories that occurred there 00:02:20.755 --> 00:02:25.475 that were uncannily similar to all the stories and beginnings 00:02:25.475 --> 00:02:26.373 of the Bible. 00:02:26.373 --> 00:02:28.055 Stories like: Adam and Eve 00:02:28.055 --> 00:02:30.305 The Fall , Cain and Abel 00:02:30.665 --> 00:02:33.955 The Flood, the limiting of human life, 00:02:33.955 --> 00:02:36.287 the event of the Tower of Babel, 00:02:36.287 --> 00:02:39.577 and Schmidt's work demonstrated that 00:02:39.577 --> 00:02:42.987 the Sumerian accounts 00:02:42.987 --> 00:02:47.740 and those that follow it from nearly 6000 years ago 00:02:47.740 --> 00:02:50.987 where in all probability the source of all those familiar 00:02:50.987 --> 00:02:52.940 biblical stories. 00:02:52.940 --> 00:02:55.817 Now, that was a problem in the 1890's 00:02:55.817 --> 00:02:57.347 because if you think about it 00:02:57.347 --> 00:03:00.087 the Church was still reading from the after effects of 00:03:00.087 --> 00:03:02.797 [Paul] Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" 00:03:02.868 --> 00:03:04.768 and it is busy putting together 00:03:04.768 --> 00:03:06.170 new doctrinal basis 00:03:06.240 --> 00:03:09.268 and new doctrines of biblical inherency 00:03:09.348 --> 00:03:10.448 to shore up the ship 00:03:10.711 --> 00:03:12.563 So the idea that the Bible 00:03:12.563 --> 00:03:15.799 might actually be based on somebody else's stories 00:03:16.709 --> 00:03:18.476 was a bit of an embarrassment 00:03:18.476 --> 00:03:19.578 It shouldn't have been 00:03:19.578 --> 00:03:22.028 because Judaism and Christianity 00:03:22.028 --> 00:03:23.778 both find their roots 00:03:23.778 --> 00:03:27.009 in the story of a Sumerian family. 00:03:27.249 --> 00:03:30.599 The family of Abraham and Sarah. 00:03:30.704 --> 00:03:32.894 Abraham and Sarah grew up and spent 00:03:32.894 --> 00:03:35.709 the best part of their lives in (research name) 00:03:35.821 --> 00:03:37.451 A Sumerian culture 00:03:37.587 --> 00:03:40.897 and so when they emigrated from there 00:03:40.945 --> 00:03:44.465 it's hardly surprising that they would carry with them 00:03:44.465 --> 00:03:46.315 [Paul] all the stories of beginnings 00:03:46.315 --> 00:03:47.902 that they had grown up with. 00:03:48.122 --> 00:03:50.992 and sew them into the foundations 00:03:51.032 --> 00:03:52.313 of what was to become 00:03:52.413 --> 00:03:53.673 their culture 00:03:53.822 --> 00:03:55.132 their religion 00:03:55.222 --> 00:03:56.742 and their Bible. 00:03:57.144 --> 00:03:59.884 And so, it shouldn't be a surprise that in the Bible 00:03:59.884 --> 00:04:03.654 we have a summary version of all these stories 00:04:03.654 --> 00:04:07.965 that ? the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian texts. 00:04:08.235 --> 00:04:10.525 The problem and the shock horror 00:04:10.525 --> 00:04:13.312 is that the original versions 00:04:13.312 --> 00:04:18.207 the Sumerian versions of these stories make no mention of God at all. 00:04:19.288 --> 00:04:22.102 In the Sumerian originals these are stories 00:04:22.102 --> 00:04:26.026 of our ancestor's contact with another species. 00:04:26.502 --> 00:04:29.312 A species called The Anunnakki. 00:04:30.783 --> 00:04:32.763 [Narrator] Could Judaism and Christianity 00:04:32.763 --> 00:04:34.247 familiar stories of God 00:04:34.247 --> 00:04:38.090 really be a retelling of our ancestor's close encounters 00:04:38.090 --> 00:04:40.627 with extraterrestrials? 00:04:41.172 --> 00:04:47.453 the cuneiform tablets which has fascinated Nathaniel Schmidt were first on Earth in 1500. 00:04:47.456 --> 00:04:52.650 As colonial powers began to escalate the ancient sites of Mesopotamia. 00:04:53.379 --> 00:04:59.329 Over the decades had followed some 200,000 clay tablets were uncovered. 00:04:59.649 --> 00:05:03.630 The tablets were adorned with strange etchings hieroglyphs 00:05:03.630 --> 00:05:06.907 made when the clay was soft. 00:05:07.046 --> 00:05:11.716 Scholars of the day divided us to the meanings of these markings 00:05:11.716 --> 00:05:15.823 Some believe that the glyphs to be an unknown written language. 00:05:15.823 --> 00:05:17.752 Others refuse to accept this. 00:05:17.752 --> 00:05:21.172 since the tablets appear to predate any known language. 00:05:21.172 --> 00:05:25.565 They presume the markings to be no more than decoration. 00:05:25.565 --> 00:05:29.284 And so the tablets were archived, 00:05:29.284 --> 00:05:32.955 the secrets were locked away for three centuries. 00:05:33.502 --> 00:05:37.282 Until it 1835, 00:05:37.282 --> 00:05:42.008 Henry Rawranson arrived. In south western Iran. 00:05:42.618 --> 00:05:47.938 Rawranson was a military man. He was employed by the East India Tea Company. 00:05:47.938 --> 00:05:51.728 And he was in Iran helping the Shah of Iran to train his troops. 00:05:51.728 --> 00:05:55.268 As worth pausing there for a moment because if you thought that 00:05:55.268 --> 00:05:59.895 corporations rivaling nations states was something new 00:05:59.895 --> 00:06:03.238 take a look at the East India Tea company. 00:06:03.268 --> 00:06:06.988 A tea company that's able to move a standing army 00:06:06.988 --> 00:06:13.010 around the world and train the armies of nation states. 00:06:13.010 --> 00:06:16.118 That's quite a tea company. 00:06:16.118 --> 00:06:22.840 In fact, Rawranson presence in Iran wasn't part of quid pro quo for trading rides. 00:06:23.027 --> 00:06:27.107 He was there for access to the district of Behistun. 00:06:27.107 --> 00:06:32.009 He wanted to find the Behistun inscription 00:06:33.273 --> 00:06:37.333 [Narrator] the Behistun inscription was an ancient royal proclamation 00:06:37.333 --> 00:06:40.043 carved into a cliff face. 00:06:40.344 --> 00:06:47.224 It was written in three known languages persian, elamite and akkadian. 00:06:47.224 --> 00:06:51.391 Which was the common language of Mesopotamian cultures. 00:06:51.435 --> 00:06:56.645 The inscription expressed all three languages in cuneiform script. 00:06:57.892 --> 00:07:03.102 It was the translation key that cuneiform tablets have been waiting for. 00:07:03.412 --> 00:07:08.362 The memories of the Mesopotamian ancient cultures was suddenly an open book. 00:07:08.502 --> 00:07:12.326 The glyphs were not made decoration after all. 00:07:12.655 --> 00:07:13.895 They were banking records 00:07:13.895 --> 00:07:15.465 business agreements, 00:07:15.465 --> 00:07:16.865 shopping lists, 00:07:16.865 --> 00:07:18.288 contracts, 00:07:18.288 --> 00:07:19.655 recipes, 00:07:19.655 --> 00:07:20.905 inventories, 00:07:20.905 --> 00:07:27.310 royal histories and the most ancient narrative in the history of the world 00:07:28.420 --> 00:07:33.939 It was in these ancient narratives that the source of the bible familiar stories 00:07:34.326 --> 00:07:36.236 began to emarge. 00:07:37.268 --> 00:07:41.468 At the academic level Nathaniel Schmidt was in good company, 00:07:41.519 --> 00:07:46.549 He was one of the small number who began confronting us with this new layer of our history. 00:07:46.549 --> 00:07:50.964 I should mention just to reassure you that shortly after Colgate university fired him 00:07:50.964 --> 00:07:58.384 he did get a new job with Cornell university. and he was a professor of Semitic languages for full 36 years. 00:07:58.384 --> 00:08:00.465 So, he did land on his feet. 00:08:00.475 --> 00:08:06.185 His work continued to argue that the cuneiform reveal that 00:08:06.185 --> 00:08:13.194 earliest history are not about god. They are about a prehistoric contact with the Anunnaki. 00:08:15.081 --> 00:08:22.101 [Narrator] In the 20th century, the writer Zecharia Sitchin began pouring over the cuneiform texts. 00:08:22.248 --> 00:08:26.487 He highlighted the clear implications of the Sumerian's stories. 00:08:26.505 --> 00:08:32.216 That the Anunnaki were powerful and advanced extraterrestrial species. 00:08:32.865 --> 00:08:38.685 Their arrival on planet Earth put them at the top of the terrestrial food chain. 00:08:39.395 --> 00:08:44.775 To create a local work force, the Anunnaki used sequences of their own genetic code 00:08:45.177 --> 00:08:53.849 to hybridize a primed ancestor into a human, ready to put to work for their Anunnaki masters. 00:08:54.763 --> 00:09:01.393 Such an argued the word Anunnaki means those who came from the heavens to Earth. 00:09:01.595 --> 00:09:05.925 A phrase that made clear that the extraterrestrials origin. 00:09:06.115 --> 00:09:10.635 Zecharia Sitchin was not an academic. He was not a Phd or a professor. 00:09:10.685 --> 00:09:15.384 He had a degree from the London School of Economics and worked in commerce. 00:09:15.404 --> 00:09:19.485 The LSE I should is a pretty august institution 00:09:19.731 --> 00:09:23.681 He wrote at a popular level. Let's to say for general audience. 00:09:23.741 --> 00:09:27.511 And not with the kind of referencing and footnotes 00:09:27.511 --> 00:09:31.428 that you expect to see in an academic kind of tome 00:09:32.041 --> 00:09:35.761 An academic critics don't like that. They think that slack. 00:09:35.928 --> 00:09:40.288 Some might identify mistakes or bias in his work. 00:09:40.710 --> 00:09:44.280 And that's then their pretext to disregard his contributions 00:09:44.280 --> 00:09:46.568 which is an important one. 00:09:46.568 --> 00:09:51.539 Now, some writers in the field reject Sitchin's translation of the word Anunnaki 00:09:51.598 --> 00:09:55.018 and they would contend that the word usage tells us 00:09:55.048 --> 00:09:58.824 that it simply means nobility or royalty. 00:09:58.824 --> 00:10:00.063 the rulers 00:10:01.338 --> 00:10:05.300 I am not persuaded by that. It's not that that's not true. 00:10:05.300 --> 00:10:09.885 It's just a very partial answer. It's a very lazy explanation. 00:10:09.960 --> 00:10:13.370 It simply doesn't ask enough of questions. 00:10:13.370 --> 00:10:16.623 Who were the rulers identified by this word? 00:10:16.623 --> 00:10:19.374 why is that word associated with the rulers? 00:10:20.303 --> 00:10:24.393 You see if yo look at the etymology of the word, at it's roots meanings 00:10:24.393 --> 00:10:26.649 look at the component parts you have Anu 00:10:26.649 --> 00:10:28.298 which means heavens 00:10:28.343 --> 00:10:30.503 ki which means Earth. 00:10:30.628 --> 00:10:34.098 Anunnaki are those who came from the heavens to the earth. 00:10:34.098 --> 00:10:38.142 You can follow the logic ,but even if you didn't have the narrative 00:10:38.142 --> 00:10:40.123 imbedded in the word itself 00:10:40.185 --> 00:10:43.797 as soon as you read the cuneiforms, the stories themselves 00:10:43.797 --> 00:10:47.441 unpack that that's exactly what was going on. 00:10:47.441 --> 00:10:51.156 And the glyph that they used to indicate the rulers 00:10:51.156 --> 00:10:54.976 who come down from the heavens at the beginning of the story 00:10:54.976 --> 00:10:57.654 that glyph simply indicates the sky 00:10:57.902 --> 00:11:01.512 So, these Anunnaki are from the heavens. 00:11:01.958 --> 00:11:03.928 The sky people. 00:11:08.410 --> 00:11:11.758 [Narrator] Many of the world's oldest mythologies claim 00:11:11.775 --> 00:11:15.235 that the governance of human society began 00:11:15.268 --> 00:11:21.240 with dominance over human beings, being established by superior beings or gods. 00:11:21.695 --> 00:11:25.935