01Interpreter · not a tradition
Zecharia Sitchin
1920–2010
A modern reading of Mesopotamian texts as a record of visitors from a planet he called Nibiru.
The sequence is not a score. It separates the old material, the claim, the citations, the other readings, and the part that can actually be established.
01
Ancient evidence
The material he points at is Sumerian and Akkadian writing: royal inscriptions, and literary works known mostly from later copies. Those copies are the evidence. They are already filed on the Sumerian row and the Mesopotamian row. This page does not add a sentence to either cell.
02
Author’s claim
In The 12th Planet (1976) and the books that followed, he claimed the Anunnaki were beings from a planet, Nibiru, on a very long orbit, and that they made humans as a workforce. He presented that as what the texts say.
03
Evidence the author cites
He cites the Anunnaki as a name in the texts, the word nibiru in astronomical and literary passages, the creation of humans from clay, the flood stories, cylinder seals, and the King List. Those are real titles and real words. A title is not his plot.
04
Alternative readings
Standard editions read Anunnaki as a group of gods, not a species with a home planet. Nibiru, in the astronomical texts, is a name used for celestial bodies and for a crossing, not a demonstrated world on a 3,600-year orbit. A transliteration is not his glossary. His books are a modern alternative interpretation. They are not the clay.
05
What can be established
He published a 20th-century interpretation. The tablets he names exist, largely as copies. His planet, his orbit, and his account of engineered workers are not established by those copies. The chart’s Sumerian cells follow the copies.
Unresolved
Whether a flood tablet and another culture’s flood story can sit in one chronology is a separate question. It is not answered by adopting his planet. Where a tablet is broken, the break stays broken. His fillings of those breaks are not an unresolved line of cuneiform.
SCARCE connections
Links leave this page. They do not import the author into the tradition.
- Sumerian Traditions — The literary tablets and the King List, as filed. His books are not that row.
- Mesopotamian Traditions — Akkadian and Babylonian poems, including the flood traditions. The cell is not his plot.
Not the same claim
- Ignatius Donnelly — 1882. A lost earthly civilization and compared flood stories. Not a planet, and not a Sumerian lexicon.
- Erich von Däniken — 1968. Ancient visitors, argued from monuments and images across cultures. Not this reading of the tablets.
- Graham Hancock — A lost human civilization around the end of the ice age. Not Nibiru, and not this lexicon.
- The Sumerian and Mesopotamian rows — He uses their texts. The cells were not rewritten to match the books.