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I've been a preacher for more than 30 years. I've studied and taught through
the book of Genesis many, many times in churches all around the world
and I've trained pastors in the skills of interpreting texts
and it's very clear they're not stories about Gods.
They're stories about the powerful ones in the Bible.
And the sky people, the Anunnaki and the Sumerian tablets
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[Narrator] In 1896 eminent scholar Nathaniel Schmidt
was fired from his position as Professor of Semitic languages
at Colgate University
For eleven years, this American University had enjoyed Nathaniel Schmidt erudition
and Semitic Languages
He delivered numerous courses in Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Arabic, Syriac
and other ancient languages besides
In fact, Nathaniel Schmidt was one of America's leading scholars in the field
So why, after eleven years of outstanding achievement
was he tried for heresy,
and fired from his tenure in 1896?
Though a devout Christian and a Baptist pastor
The authorities considered that his recent
theological papers had struck at the very roots
of two world religions
Christianity and Judaism.
What Nathaniel Schmidt had done wrong
was read the Sumerian and Babylonian
and Assyrian text and notice that they were full
of fascinating parallels. Stories that occurred there
that were uncannily similar to all the stories and beginnings
of the Bible.
Stories like: Adam and Eve
The Fall, Cain and Abel
The Flood, the limiting of human life,
the event of the Tower of Babel,
and Schmidt's work demonstrated that
the Sumerian accounts
and those that follow it from nearly 6000 years ago
where in all probability the source of all those familiar
biblical stories.
Now, that was a problem in the 1890's
because if you think about it
the Church was still reading from the after effects of
[Paul] Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species"
and it is busy putting together
new doctrinal basis
and new doctrines of biblical inherency
to shore up the ship
So the idea that the Bible
might actually be based on somebody else's stories
was a bit of an embarrassment
It shouldn't have been
because Judaism and Christianity
both find their roots
in the story of a Sumerian family.
The family of Abraham and Sarah.
Abraham and Sarah grew up and spent
the best part of their lives in (research name)
A Sumerian culture
and so when they emigrated from there
it's hardly surprising that they would carry with them
all the stories of beginnings
that they had grown up with.
and sew them into the foundations
of what was to become
their culture
their religion
and their Bible.
And so, it shouldn't be a surprise that in the Bible
we have a summary version of all these stories
that pepper the Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian texts.
The problem and the shock horror
is that the original versions
the Sumerian versions of these stories make no mention of God at all.
In the Sumerian originals these are stories
of our ancestor's contact with another species.
A species called The Anunnakki.
[Narrator] Could Judaism and Christianity
familiar stories of God
really be a retelling of our ancestor's close encounters
with extraterrestrials?
the cuneiform tablets which has fascinated Nathaniel Schmidt were first on Earth in 1500.
As colonial powers began to escalate the ancient sites of Mesopotamia.
Over the decades had followed some 200,000 clay tablets were uncovered.
The tablets were adorned with strange etchings or glyphs
made when the clay was soft.
Scholars of the day divided us to the meanings of these markings
Some believe that the glyphs to be an unknown written language.
Others refuse to accept this.
since the tablets appear to predate any known language.
They presume the markings to be no more than decoration.
And so the tablets were archived,
the secrets were locked away for three centuries.
Until it 1835,
Henry Rawranson arrived. In south western Iran.
Rawranson was a military man. He was employed by the East India Tea Company.
And he was in Iran helping the Shah of Iran to train his troops.
As worth pausing there for a moment because if you thought that
corporations rivaling nations states was something new
take a look at the East India Tea company.
A tea company that's able to move a standing army
around the world and train the armies of nation states.
That's quite a tea company.
In fact, Rawranson presence in Iran wasn't part of quid pro quo for trading rides.
He was there for access to the district of Behistun.
He wanted to find the Behistun inscription
[Narrator] the Behistun inscription was an ancient royal proclamation
carved into a cliff face.
It was written in three known languages persian, elamite and akkadian.
Which was the common language of Mesopotamian cultures.
The inscription expressed all three languages in cuneiform script.
It was the translation key that cuneiform tablets have been waiting for.
The memories of the Mesopotamian ancient cultures was suddenly an open book.
The glyphs were not made decoration after all.
They were banking records
business agreements,
shopping lists,
contracts,
recipes,
inventories,
royal histories and the most ancient narrative in the history of the world
It was in these ancient narratives that the source of the bible familiar stories
began to emarge.
At the academic level Nathaniel Schmidt was in good company,
He was one of the small number who began confronting us with this new layer of our history.
I should mention just to reassure you that shortly after Colgate university fired him
he did get a new job with Cornell university. and he was a professor of Semitic languages for full 36 years.
So, he did land on his feet.
His work continued to argue that the cuneiform reveal that
earliest history are not about god. They are about a prehistoric contact with the Anunnaki.
[Narrator] In the 20th century, the writer Zecharia Sitchin began pouring over the cuneiform texts.
He highlighted the clear implications of the Sumerian's stories.
That the Anunnaki were powerful and advanced extraterrestrial species.
Their arrival on planet Earth put them at the top of the terrestrial food chain.
To create a local work force, the Anunnaki used sequences of their own genetic code
to hybridize a primed ancestor into a human, ready to put to work for their Anunnaki masters.
Such an argued the word Anunnaki means those who came from the heavens to Earth.
A phrase that made clear that the extraterrestrials origin.
Zecharia Sitchin was not an academic. He was not a Phd or a professor.
He had a degree from the London School of Economics and worked in commerce.
The LSE I should is a pretty august institution
He wrote at a popular level. Let's to say for general audience.
And not with the kind of referencing and footnotes
that you expect to see in an academic kind of tome
An academic critics don't like that. They think that slack.
Some might identify mistakes or bias in his work.
And that's then their pretext to disregard his contributions
which is an important one.
Now, some writers in the field reject Sitchin's translation of the word Anunnaki
and they would contend that the word usage tells us
that it simply means nobility or royalty.
the rulers
I am not persuaded by that. It's not that that's not true.
It's just a very partial answer. It's a very lazy explanation.
It simply doesn't ask enough of questions.
Who were the rulers identified by this word?
why is that word associated with the rulers?
You see if yo look at the etymology of the word, at it's roots meanings
look at the component parts you have Anu
which means heavens
ki which means Earth.
Anunnaki are those who came from the heavens to the earth.
You can follow the logic ,but even if you didn't have the narrative
imbedded in the word itself
as soon as you read the cuneiforms, the stories themselves
unpack that that's exactly what was going on.
And the glyph that they used to indicate the rulers
who come down from the heavens at the beginning of the story
that glyph simply indicates the sky
So, these Anunnaki are from the heavens.
The sky people.
[Narrator] Many of the world's oldest mythologies claim
that the governance of human society began
with dominance over human beings, being established by superior beings or gods.