Zecharia Sitchin was an Azerbaijani-born American author of books proposing an explanation for
human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributes the creation of the ancient
Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he states was a race of extraterrestrials from
a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He believed this hypothetical planet of Nibiru
to be in an elongated, elliptical orbit in the Earth's own Solar System, asserting that
Sumerian mythology reflects this view. Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide
and have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Sitchin's ideas have been rejected by scientists and academics, who dismiss his work as pseudoscience
and pseudohistory. His work has been criticized for flawed methodology and mistranslations
of ancient texts as well as for incorrect astronomical and scientific claims.
Early life Sitchin was born in the Azerbaijan SSR, but
was raised in Mandatory Palestine. He received a degree in economics from the University
of London, and was an editor and journalist in Israel, before moving to New York in 1952.
While working as an executive for a shipping company, he taught himself Sumerian cuneiform
and visited several archaeological sites. Ideas and works
Similar to earlier authors such as Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Däniken, Sitchin
advocated hypotheses in which extraterrestrial events supposedly played a significant role
in ancient human history. According to Sitchin's interpretation of Mesopotamian
iconography and symbology, outlined in his 1976 book The 12th Planet and its sequels,
there is an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune that follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching
the inner solar system roughly every 3,600 years. This planet is called Nibiru. According
to Sitchin, Nibiru collided catastrophically with Tiamat, which he considers to be another
planet once located between Mars and Jupiter. This collision supposedly formed the planet
Earth, the asteroid belt, and the comets. Sitchin states that when struck by one of
planet Nibiru's moons, Tiamat split in two, and then on a second pass Nibiru itself struck
the broken fragments and one half of Tiamat became the asteroid belt. The second half,
struck again by one of Nibiru's moons, was pushed into a new orbit and became today's
planet Earth. According to Sitchin, Nibiru was the home
of a technologically advanced human-like extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki in Sumerian myth,
who Sitchin states are called the Nephilim in Genesis. He wrote that they evolved after
Nibiru entered the solar system and first arrived on Earth probably 450,000 years ago,
looking for minerals, especially gold, which they found and mined in Africa. Sitchin states
that these "gods" were the rank-and-file workers of the colonial expedition to Earth from planet
Nibiru. Sitchin wrote that Enki suggested that to
relieve the Anunnaki, who had mutinied over their dissatisfaction with their working conditions,
that primitive workers be created by genetic engineering as slaves to replace them in the
gold mines by crossing extraterrestrial genes with those of Homo erectus. According to Sitchin,
ancient inscriptions report that the human civilization in Sumer, Mesopotamia, was set
up under the guidance of these "gods", and human kingship was inaugurated to provide
intermediaries between mankind and the Anunnaki. Sitchin believes that fallout from nuclear
weapons, used during a war between factions of the extraterrestrials, is the "evil wind"
described in the Lament for Ur that destroyed Ur around 2000 BC. Sitchin states the exact
year is 2024 BC. Sitchin says that his research coincides with many biblical texts, and that
biblical texts come originally from Sumerian writings.
Influence Since the release of his first book The 12th
Planet in 1976, now in its 45th printing, Sitchin wrote seven other books as part of
his Earth Chronicles series, as well as six other companion books, all of which are still
in print as of 2012. Sitchin's books sold millions of copies worldwide and have been
published in more than 25 languages. New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon noted that
despite academic dismissal of his work, Sitchin had "a devoted following of readers".
Critic Michael Heiser called Sitchin "arguably the most important proponent of the ancient
astronaut hypothesis over the last several decades". Sitchin was a frequent guest on
the Coast to Coast AM radio show, which in 2010 presented Sitchin with a lifetime achievement
award. Gods of the New Millennium author Alan F. Alford admits he initially became "infatuated"
with Sitchin's hypotheses but later became a critic of Sitchin's interpretations of myth.
According to some writers, Sitchin's ideas along with those of Erich von Däniken may
have influenced the beliefs of the religious sect of Raëlism, and writer Mark Pilkington
sees the mythology of Japan's Pana Wave religious group as rooted in Sitchin's The 12th Planet
and its sequels. The 1994 movie Stargate, directed by Roland
Emmerich, and the 2009 video game The Conduit drew some conceptual inspiration from Sitchin's
ideas, while screenwriter Roberto Orci says the villains of the film Cowboys & Aliens
were inspired by Sitchin's conceptualization of the Anunnaki as gold-mining aliens.
Criticisms Criticism of Sitchin's work falls primarily
into three categories: translations and interpretations of ancient texts, astronomical and scientific
observations, and literalism of myth. Translations and interpretations
When Sitchin wrote his books, only specialists could read the Sumerian language. However,
sources such as the 2006 book Sumerian Lexicon have made the language more accessible to
non-experts. Ancient language scholar Michael S. Heiser
states he has found many inaccuracies in Sitchin's translations and challenges interested parties
to use this book to check their validity. Prof. Ronald H. Fritze, author of the book
Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions, mentions the example
of Sitchin's claim that the Sumerian sign Din-Gir means "pure ones of the blazing rockets",
adding that "Sitchin's assignment of meanings to ancient words is tendentious and frequently
strained." Fritze also commented on Sitchin's methodology, writing that "When critics have
checked Sitchin's references, they have found that he frequently quotes out of context or
truncates his quotes in a way that distorts evidence in order to prove his contentions.
Evidence is presented selectively and contradictory evidence is ignored."
Sitchin bases his arguments on his personal interpretations of pre-Nubian and Sumerian
texts, and the seal VA 243. Sitchin wrote that these ancient civilizations knew of a
twelfth planet, when in fact they only knew five. Hundreds of Sumerian astronomical seals
and calendars have been decoded and recorded, and the total count of planets on each seal
has been five. Seal VA 243 has 12 dots that Sitchin identifies as planets. When translated,
seal VA 243 reads "You're his Servant" which is now thought to be a message from a nobleman
to a servant. According to semitologist Michael S. Heiser, the so-called sun on Seal VA 243
is not the Sumerian symbol for the sun but is a star, and the dots are also stars. The
symbol on seal VA 243 has no resemblance to the hundreds of documented Sumerian sun symbols.
In a 1979 review of The Twelfth Planet, Roger W. Wescott, Professor of Anthropology and
Linguistics at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey, noted Sitchin's amateurishness with
respect to the primacy of the Sumerian language:
Sitchin's linguistics seems at least as amateurish as his anthropology, biology, and astronomy.
On p. 370, for example, he maintains that "all the ancient languages ... including early
Chinese ... stemmed from one primeval source -- Sumerian". Sumerian, of course, is the
virtual archetype of what linguistic taxonomists call a language-isolate, meaning a language
that does not fall into any of the well-known language-families or exhibit clear cognation
with any known language. Even if Sitchin is referring to written rather than to spoken
language, it is unlikely that his contention can be persuasively defended, since Sumerian
ideograms were preceded by the Azilian and Tartarian signaries of Europe as well as by
a variety of script-like notational systems between the Nile and Indus rivers.
Astronomical and scientific observations Sitchin's "planetary collision" view does
superficially resemble a theory by modern astronomers—the giant impact theory of the
Moon's formation about 4.5 billion years ago by a body impacting with the newly formed
Earth. However, Sitchin's proposed series of rogue planetary collisions differ in both
details and timing. As with Immanuel Velikovsky's earlier Worlds in Collision thesis, Sitchin
states that he has found evidence of ancient human knowledge of rogue celestial motions
in a variety of mythological accounts. In Velikovsky's case, these interplanetary collisions
were supposed to have taken place within the span of human existence, whereas for Sitchin
these occurred during the early stages of planetary formation, but entered the mythological
account passed down via the alien race which purportedly evolved on Nibiru after these
encounters. According to former Immanuel Velikovsky assistant
turned prolific critic, C. Leroy Ellenberger, "[Sitchin states that] from an equal start,
the Nephilim evolved on Nibiru 45 million years ahead of comparable development on Earth
with its decidedly more favorable environment. Such an outcome is unlikely, to say the least,
since Nibiru would spend over 99% of its time beyond Pluto. Sitchin's explanation that heat
from radioactive decay and a thick atmosphere keep Nibiru warm is absurd and does not address
the problem of darkness in deep space. Also unexplained is how the Nephilim, who evolved
long after Nibiru arrived, knew what happened when Nibiru first entered the solar system."
The scenario outlined by Sitchin, with Nibiru returning to the inner solar system regularly
every 3,600 years,
... implies an orbit with a semi-major axis of 235 astronomical units, extending from
the asteroid belt to twelve times farther beyond the sun than Pluto. Elementary perturbation
theory indicates that, under the most favorable circumstances of avoiding close encounters
with other planets, no body with such an eccentric orbit would keep the same period for two consecutive
passages. Within twelve orbits the object would be either ejected or converted to a
short period object. Thus, the failed search for a trans-Plutonian planet by T.C. Van Flandern,
of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which Sitchin uses to bolster his thesis, is no support
at all.
Sitchin in "the case of Adam’s alien genes" states that 223 genes found by the Human Genome
Sequencing Consortium are without the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.
Later researchers have argued that the conclusion from the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium
cannot be drawn due to a lack of a comprehensive gene database for comparison. An analysis
by Salzberg identified 40 potential genes laterally transferred into the genome from
prokaryotic organisms. Salzberg also argues that gene loss combined with sample size effects
and evolutionary rate variation provide an alternative, more biologically plausible explanation.
Literalism of myth Peter James, co-author of the controversial
book Centuries of Darkness, has criticized Sitchin both for ignoring the world outside
Mesopotamia and more specifically for misunderstanding Babylonian literature:
He uses the Epic of Creation Enuma Elish as the foundation for his cosmogony, identifying
the young god Marduk, who overthrows the older regime of gods and creates the Earth, as the
unknown "Twelfth Planet". In order to do this he interprets the Babylonian theogony as a
factual account of the birth of the other "eleven" planets. The Babylonian names for
the planets are established beyond a shadow of a doubt—Ishtar was the deity of Venus,
Nergal of Mars, and Marduk of Jupiter—and confirmed by hundreds of astronomical/astrological
tables and treatises on clay tablets and papyri from the Hellenistic period. Sitchin merrily
ignores all this and assigns unwarranted planetary identities to the gods mentioned in the theogony.
For example, Apsu, attested as god of the primeval waters, becomes, of all things, the
Sun! Ea, as it suits Sitchin, is sometimes planet Neptune and sometimes a spaceman. And
the identity of Ishtar as the planet Venus, a central feature of Mesopotamian religion,
is nowhere mentioned in the book—instead Sitchin arbitrarily assigns to Venus another
deity from Enuma Elish, and reserves Ishtar for a role as a female astronaut.
William Irwin Thompson comments on what he calls Sitchin's 'literalism':
What Sitchin sees is what he needs for his hypothesis. So figure 15 on page 40 is radiation
therapy, and figure 71 on page 136 is a god inside a rocket-shaped chamber. If these are
gods, why are they stuck with our cheap B movie technology of rockets, microphones,
space-suits, and radiation therapy? If they are gods, then why can't they have some really
divine technology such as intradimensional worm-hole travel, antigravity, starlight propulsion,
or black hole bounce rematerializations? Sitchin has constructed what appears to be a convincing
argument, but when he gets close to single images on ancient tablets, he falls back into
the literalism of "Here is an image of the gods in rockets." Suddenly, ancient Sumer
is made to look like the movie set for Destination Moon. Erich Von Däniken's potboiler Chariots
of the Gods? has the same problem. Nazca plains in Peru is turned into a World War II landing
strip. The gods can cross galactic distances, but by the time they get to Peru, their spaceships
are imagined as World War II prop jobs that need an enormous landing strip. This literalization
of the imagination doesn't make any sense, but every time it doesn't, you hear Sitchin
say "There can be no doubt, but..."
Bibliography Earth Chronicles volumes
The 12th Planet, New York: Stein and Day, 1976, ISBN 0-8128-1939-X
The Stairway to Heaven, 1980, Avon Books The Wars of Gods and Men, 1985, Avon Books
The Lost Realms, Avon Books, 1990, ISBN 0-380-75890-3 When Time Began, 1993,
The Cosmic Code, Avon Books, 1998, ISBN 0-380-80157-4 The End of Days: Armageddon and Prophecies
of the Return, William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-123823-9
The Complete Earth Chronicles, Bear & Company, 2014, ISBN 978-1591432012
Companion volumes Genesis Revisited: Is Modern Science Catching
Up With Ancient Knowledge?, Divine Encounters: A Guide to Visions, Angels
and Other Emissaries, Avon Books, 1995, ISBN 0-380-78076-3
The Lost Book of Enki: Memoirs and Prophecies of an Extraterrestrial god, Bear & Company,
2001, ISBN 1-59143-037-2 The Earth Chronicles Expeditions, Bear & Company,
2004, ISBN 978-1-59143-076-6 Journeys to the Mythical Past, Bear and Company,
2007 ISBN 978-1-59143-080-3 The Earth Chronicles Handbook, Bear & Company,
2009, ISBN 978-1-59143-101-5 There Were Giants Upon the Earth: Gods, Demigods,
and Human Ancestry: The Evidence of Alien DNA,, 2010, ISBN 978-1-59143-121-3
The King Who Refused to Die: The Anunnaki and
The Search for Immortality, Bear & Company, 2013, ISBN 978-1-59143-177-0
DVDs Are We Alone in the Universe?, documentary,
1978 An Evening with Zecharia Sitchin, lecture
and slide presentation, 1997 A Talk From The Heart! lecture and slide presentation,
2006 Signs of the Return, lecture and slide presentation,
2009 2012—the End of Days? lecture and slide
presentation, 2010 Zecharia at 90—Farewell Address, lecture,
2010 See also
David Icke Extraterrestrial hypothesis
Giorgio A. Tsoukalos Mesopotamian mythology
Murry Hope Robert K. G. Temple
Sumerian literature References
External links Official Website
Kilgannon, Corey. "Origin of Species, From an Alien View", The New York Times, January
10, 2010. p. MB4. Zecharia Sitchin Audio Tribute on Coast to
Coast AM Criticisms
Ian Lawton's Mesopotamia Papers An Astronomer's View of the Akkadian Seal
by Tom van Flandern SitchinIsWrong.com: A Polemical Website against
the Theories of Zechariah Sitchin