static noise effect mysterious music 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 static noise effect [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 in 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 rights. 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 bibles familiar stories began to emarge. At an 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'd 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'm 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. and then the job of rulership is handed over at a later stage to human governors or kings Egyptian mythology holds such a narrative Similarly The Bible speaks of King Sol as the first human king over the people of god The Semeirian cuneiforms also name their first human king Gilgamesh To be more accurate, Gilgamesh is a transition king A hybrid of human and annunaki His name appears on one of the most famous of Mesopotamian artifacts The Sumerian King's list Among the shopping lists, legal agreements, business contracts and all the rest of the cuneiform tablets There appears what on first inspection is a dry record of a succesion of kings of Sumeria The most recent entries record reigns of 6 to 36 years As we go further back on the timeline the kings list starts running with some odd looking information because out of the blue we suddenly read of a dynasty that lasted 24,510 years 3 months and 3 and a half days Now that precision absolutely befits Sumerian culture because its from Semerian culture that we get 360 degrees in a circle 60 seconds in a minute 60 minutes in an hour so the precision doesn't surprise us what is odd is that that dynasty of 24,500 years, 3 months and 3 and a half days was divided across no more than 23 kings thats an average range of more than a thousand years each and its not a one off the dynasty concluded by the great flood lasted 241,000 years shared by no more than 8 kings that's an average range of more than 30,000 years Now, some have tried to make the dates symbolic or have interpreted their unit of timedifferently but that doesn't quite work when its an unbroken record of 6 to 36 year reigns uh to 36,000 years reigns all in the same unit of time all in the same narrative the narrative begins with non-human kings who then hand over to human kings and this elasticity of the length of their dynasty's is another suggestion that the non-human kings are something quite different to juman beings it's like comparing the lifespan of a human being with the lifespan of an ant (Narrarator) the king's list is not the only evidence pointing to an extraterrestrial hypothesis the Sumerian version of The Tower of Babel speaks of 50 technicians who employ mysterious technology to dispatch 300 observers to their stations in the stars right along side the genesis account the two narratives confirm one another and paint a vivid picture Babel, was a stargate providing the observers rapid access to space stations The thing that got me into this whole field of research was an anomalous word in the book of genesis I've been a preacher for more than 30 years I've studied and talked 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 So I've long known about this anomalous word Well finally i allowed myself the time to sit down and really drill into what was going on Genesis uses two words for god One is Elohim and one is Yaweh or Jehovah Now, Yaweh is the holy name given to Moses in a time, centureis or millenia after all the action described in the stories of beginnings So, the fact that the word Yaweh appears in those much older stories that clues us that we're not reading the original version of the stories The sotries are being retold by someone after the time of Moses Now, there's a broad consensus among biblical scholars that the current version of the old testament the Hebrew scriptures was edited or redacted sometime in the sixth century B.C.E. and that the redacter, by putting the name Yaweh into these older stories, the stories that Abraham and Sarah have brought with them was telling the reader to regard them as God's stories by using the later name he's also telling the reader, this is not the original version Originally, they were Elohim's stories Now that word Elohim is a very interesting word because it's a plural form word it often exhibits plural behaviors, "Let us make, let us make the humans to look like one of us, we dont want them to become to much like one of us etc". The word Elohim often takes plural verb forms its sometimes translated as god but in other places it gets translated as false gods or demons or angels or cheiftans or land barons so why this enormous elasticity in the words meaning Well again, we have to go back to the roots of the word and ask why is it used that way and why does it behave like a plural When you look at its component parts the word Elohim means the powers or the powerful ones now when you read genesis translating the word that way the texts change and suddenly line up with the Sumerian texts One by one they confirm each others stories and its very clear they're not stories about gods they're stories about the powerful ones in the bible and the sky people, the Annunaki in the Sumerian tablets (Narrarator) but is there any material evidence that a non-human ruling presence ever occupied planet earth one might reasonably ask Why have no physical remains of Annunaki been found? firstly i would note that the more we dig up ancient sites the greater a diversity of ancient peoples were finding if you think about the hobbits that were found in Indonesia We called them hobbits think the proper name is homoforensis or the giants of noble county or the red-haired giants of North America or the long skull of piraka etc. There's a great range of people that we're beginning to come across as we dig into our ancient past so how would we know if we found an Anunnaki well one obvious possibility is by DNA testing so if Gilgamesh really was a human Anunnaki hybrid then all we have to do is find the royal tomb and DNA test him well I believe that's exactly what happened in Iraq in 2003 a team went in protected by American troops at the beginning of 2003 Iraq invasion and found Gilgamesh's tomb Fassbender spoke to the BBC you can go on his website you can read all about it now the officail story is that having located the probable tomb site 16 years ago we decided not to investigate any further Similarly in 1927 the British archeologist Leonard Woolley discovered a person known as Queen Puabi now she was a high ranking Sumerian leader who lived around 2500 BCE and they had found her remains so agian here's another find which with today's technology provides us with the oppurtunity to DNA test we can now test Sumerian royalty to comfirm whether it was entirely human, the result, apparently we've decided not to investigate any further Now what do you make of that? Wouldn't you want to know?