Almost every modern claim about the Anunnaki as visitors from another world traces back to a single book: The 12th Planet, published in 1976. Its author, Zecharia Sitchin, went on to write a long series under the title The Earth Chronicles, and those books are the source of nearly everything said on the subject since, usually at second or third hand and usually without attribution.
That makes the book unusually worth examining directly, because the claim and its origin are not separated by centuries of transmission. They are separated by one man and one shelf of paperbacks.
What is claimed
Sitchin argued that Sumerian and Akkadian texts are not myth but a literal record, written by people who were describing events they had witnessed or been told about by the beings involved.
On that reading the texts describe a further planet in our solar system, Nibiru, traveling an enormous elliptical orbit that brings it back to the inner system roughly every 3,600 years. Its inhabitants, the Anunnaki, came to Earth in search of gold. Finding the mining work heavy, they produced a labor force by genetic engineering, combining their own material with that of an existing hominid. That hybrid is us.
The title carries part of the argument. Counting the sun and the moon alongside the planets, as Sitchin held the Sumerians did, and adding Nibiru, produces twelve bodies. Human civilisation, in this account, begins as a workforce management problem.
Where it came from
Sitchin was born in 1920 and died in 2010. He was raised in Palestine, worked for many years as a journalist and editor, and taught himself to read ancient Near Eastern languages. He was not trained as an Assyriologist and did not claim to have been. He presented himself as an independent scholar reading primary material that professionals had, in his view, misread by assuming in advance that it was mythology.
The books were built out of real sources. Sumerian and Akkadian literature is genuinely full of gods who descend, who quarrel over territory, who create humans to relieve themselves of labor. The Atrahasis epic contains a version of exactly that last motif: lesser gods refuse the work, and humanity is made to take it on. Sitchin did not invent the raw material. What he did was insist on reading it as reportage.
The commercial result was extraordinary. The Earth Chronicles sold in the millions across dozens of editions, and arrived at the right moment to feed a television and publishing appetite for ancient astronaut material that has not slackened since. A great deal of what circulates today as ancient Sumerian tradition is in fact Sitchin, restated.
What the record shows
The specialists who read these languages for a living do not accept the translations, and the disagreement is not a matter of interpretation at the margins. It concerns what individual words mean.
Anunnaki is a term for a group of deities in Mesopotamian religion. The name is generally understood to mean something close to offspring of Anu, the sky god, and in later Akkadian usage the Anunnaki are associated with the underworld. They are gods within the texts, treated as gods, receiving the offerings gods receive. Nothing in the vocabulary marks them as travellers from elsewhere.
Nibiru does appear in Mesopotamian astronomical texts, and this is where the argument is sharpest. In that literature it functions as a term connected with crossing, a marker or ford point, and it is most commonly identified with Jupiter, though the usage shifts between texts. It is not described as a further planet, and it is not described as returning on a long cycle.
The figure of 3,600 has a plainer explanation than an orbit. Mesopotamian arithmetic is sexagesimal, built on sixty. The unit known as a sar is 3,600, that is sixty sixties, and it appears where very large numbers are needed, most famously in the king lists that assign implausibly long reigns to rulers before the flood. Reading a number as a period in years, and then as an orbital period, requires two steps that the texts themselves do not take.
There is also a straightforward problem of scale. An object on the orbit described would be a substantial planet passing repeatedly through the inner solar system. It would perturb the orbits of the planets it passed, measurably and repeatedly, and those orbits are among the most precisely known quantities in science. No such perturbation is observed.
Why it works anyway
Dismissing the appeal as gullibility explains nothing. The reading works because it does something the standard account does not.
It takes the texts seriously as statements about real events, which is intuitively more respectful than treating them as symbolic. It supplies a single explanation for several things that feel as though they ought to be connected: the abruptness of Sumerian civilisation in the record, the scale of certain early construction, the shared flood narratives. And it puts a beginning to the human story, with a reason, which is a thing myths do because people want it.
The scholarly account is genuinely less satisfying. It says that Sumerian civilisation was preceded by several thousand years of development that leaves a thinner archaeological trace, that flood stories are common in societies built on flood plains, and that the texts are religious literature written by people whose categories were not ours. All of which is well supported, and none of which resolves into a story.
That gap is where the books live, and it is worth understanding rather than sneering at. The claim is checkable, though, and it has been checked. It rests on translations that the people who read the language do not recognize.