The Annunaki

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<h2>The Annunaki</h2>
Edited & compiled by David Slone 
<a href="http://www.honestinformation.com">www.honestinformation.com</a>
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<img width="313" height="222" alt="Ancient Sumerian Seal Depicting the Anunnaki" src="You Must Download the image and upload it to your server and place url here"> 
Ancient Sumerian Seal Depicting the Anunnaki
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<img width="250" height="133" alt="Cylinder Seal from Ur III" src="You Must Download the image and upload it to your server and place url here"></a> 
Cylinder Seal from Ur III. 
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The Epic of Gilgamesh was inscribed on stone tablets by the Sumerians in the Akkadian language a thousand years before the Iliad and the Bible and was found in fragments. The tablets were buried during the fall of Nineveh. Various portions of the epic were composed in the late third millennium B.C. The writing includes a flood story that very closely parallels the description of Noah and his ark in Genesis of the Bible. Gilgamesh is described as a giant with wealth and power.


<a href="http://www.honestinformation.com/ancient/gilgamesh.php">Read The Epic of Gilgamesh</a>

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The Anunnaki or Anunnaku are a group of Sumerian mythological and Akkadian deities related to, and in some cases overlapping with, the Annuna (the 'Fifty Great Gods') and the Igigi (minor gods). The name is variously written "da-nuna", "da-nuna-ke4-ne", or "da-nun-na", meaning something like 'those of royal blood'. The head of the Anunnaki council was the Great Anu, the sky god, and the other members were his offspring. His throne was inherited by Enlil, resulting in a dispute between Enlil and his brother Enki regarding who was the rightful leader. Enki was an alchemist and was said to have created mankind.


The Anunnaki were the High Council of the Gods, and Anu's companions. They were distributed through the Earth and the Underworld. The most known of them were Asaru, Asarualim, Asarualimnunna, Asaruludu, En-Ki (Ea for the Akkadians), Namru, Namtillaku and Tutu.


A conventional analysis of Sumerian religious practice can be found in Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization by A. Leo Oppenheim. The revised edition was published in 1977. Unlike popular fantasies of pseudoarchaeology, Oppenheim cautions against too confident and sweeping interpretations of the gods of a "lost civilization."


Ancient Mesopotamia--the area now called Iraq--has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East.


Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun.

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<h2>
Enlil</h2>
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Enlil was the name of a chief deity in Babylonian religion, perhaps pronounced and sometimes rendered in translations as Ellil in later Akkadian. The name is Sumerian and has been believed to mean 'Lord Wind' though a more literal interpretation is 'Lord of the Command'.


Enlil was the god of wind, or the sky between earth and heaven. One story has him originate as the exhausted breath of An (God of the heavens) and Ki (goddess of the Earth) after sexual union. Another accounts is that he and his sister Ninhursag/Ninmah/Aruru were children of an obscure god Enki 'Lord Earth' (not the famous Enki) by Ninki 'Lady Earth'.


When Enlil was a young god, he was banished from Dilmun, home of the gods, to Kur, the underworld for raping a young girl named Ninlil. Ninlil followed him to the underworld where she bore his first child, the moon god Sin. After fathering three more underworld deities, Enlil was allowed to return to Dilmun.


Enlil was also known as the inventor of the pickaxe/hoe (favorite tool of the Sumerians) and the cause of plants growing. He used be in the possession of all the holy Me, until he gave them to Enki for safe keeping, who summarily lost them to Inanna in a drunken stupor.


Enlil's relation to An 'Sky', in theory the supreme god of the Sumerian pantheon, was somewhat like that of a Frankish mayor of the palace compared to the king, or that of a Japanese shogun compared to the emperor, or to a prime minister in a modern constitutional monarchy compared to the supposed monarch. While An was in name rular in the highest heavens, it was Enlil who mostly did the actual ruling over the world.


By his wife Ninlil or Sud, Enlil was father of the moon god Nanna (in Akkadian Sin) and of Ninurta (also called Ningirsu). Enlil is sometimes father of Nergal, of Nisaba the goddess of grain, of Pabilsag who is sometimes equated with Ninurta, and sometimes of Enbilulu. By Ereshkigal Enlil was father of Namtar.


Enlil is associated with the ancient city of Nippur, and since Enlu with the determinative for "land" or "district" is a common method of writing the name of the city, it follows, apart from other evidence, that Enlil was originally the patron deity of Nippur.


At a very early period prior to 3000 BC Nippur had become the centre of a political district of considerable extent. Inscriptions found at Nippur, where extensive excavations were carried on during 1888 to 1900 by Messrs Peters and Haynes, under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, show that Enlil was the head of an extensive pantheon. Among the titles accorded to him are "king of lands," "king of heaven and earth" and "father of the gods".


His chief temple at Nippur was known as Ekur, signifying 'House of the mountain', and such was the sanctity acquired by this edifice that Babylonian and Assyrian rulers, down to the latest days, vied with one another in embellishing and restoring Enlil's seat of worship, and the name Ekur became the designation of a temple in general.


Grouped around the main sanctuary, there arose temples and chapels to the gods and goddesses who formed his court, so that Ekur became the name for an entire sacred precinct in the city of Nippur. The name "mountain house" suggests a lofty structure and was perhaps the designation originally of the staged tower at Nippur, built in imitation of a mountain, with the sacred shrine of the god on the top.


When, with the political rise of Babylon as the center of a great empire, Nippur yielded its prerogatives to the city over which Marduk presided, the attributes and the titles of Enlil were largely transferred to Marduk. But Enlil did not, however, entirely lose his right to have any considerable political importance, while in addition the doctrine of a triad of gods symbolizing the three divisions heavens, earth and water assured to Enlil, to whom the earth was assigned as his province, his place in the religious system.


It was no doubt in part Enlil's position as the second figure of the triad that enabled him to survive the political eclipse of Nippur and made his sanctuary a place of pilgrimage to which Assyrian kings down to the days of Assur-bani-pal paid their homage equally with Babylonian rulers.


The Sumerian ideogram for Enlil or Ellil was formerly incorrectly read as Bel by scholars, but in fact Enlil was not especially given the title Bel 'Lord' more than many other gods. The Babylonian god Marduk is mostly the god persistently called Bel in late Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions and it is Marduk that mostly appears in Greek and Latin texts as Belos or Belus. References in older literature to Enlil as the old Bel and Marduk as the young Bel derive from this error in reading.

Enki was a deity in Sumerian mythology, later known as Ea in Babylonian mythology. He was the deity of water, intelligence and creation. The main temple to Enki was in Eridu. He was the keeper of the holy Me. Contrary to the translation of his name ("en" meaning "lord", and "ki" meaning "earth"; "Lord of the Earth"), he is the lord of the Abzu, the watery abyss. His name is possibly an epithet bestowed on him for the creation of the first man, Adamu or Adapa. His symbols included a goat and a fish, which later combined into a single beast, the Capricorn, which became one of the signs of the zodiac.


Enki had a penchant for beer and a string of incestuous affairs. First he had intercorse with his daughter (by way of his consort Ninhursag) Ninsar. He then had intercourse with Ninsar who gave birth to Ninkurra. Finally, he and Ninkurra spawned Uttu.


According to Sumerian mythology, Enki allowed humanity to survive the Deluge designed to kill them. After Enlil, An and the rest of the apparent Council of Deities, decided that Man would suffer total annihilation, he covertly rescued the human man Ziusudra by either instructing him to build some kind of an boat for his family, or by bringing him into the heavens in a magic boat. This is apparently the oldest surviving source of the Noah's Ark myth and other parallel Middle Eastern Deluge myths.


Enki was considered a god of life and replenishment, and was often depicted with streams of water emanating from his shoulders. Alongside him were trees symbolising the male and female aspects of nature, each holding the male and female aspects of the 'Life Essence', which he, as apparent alchemist of the gods, would masterfully mix to create several beings that would live upon the face of the earth.


According to Zecharia Sitchin Enki was the same as Ptah and Poseidon / Neptune. He supposedly created a being called LU.LU. by mixing the Life Essence of animals with the Life Essence of the gods. This LU.LU. (which means mixed), would go on to receive more god-like attributes as a result of Enki's creator-ambitions, and subsequently humans were created.

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<h2>
Ancient Astronaut Theory</h2>
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Some ancient astronaut theorists such as Zecharia Sitchin, 
Sherry Shriner, Laurence Gardner and David Icke claim that the Anunnaki were in fact extra-terrestrials who came to Earth in antiquity and created or tampered with the genetic makeup of primitive mankind. They propose various readings of the word, two of which are "anu-na-ki" and "an-unnak-ki", both translated something like 'those who came from heaven to Earth'. (Compare the Raelian translation of Elohim.)


According to Sitchin in his book The 12th Planet, these beings were related to the Biblical Nephilim and lived on a planet called Nibiru, an alleged 12th planet of the solar system. He proposes that fallout from their nuclear weapons was the "evil wind" that destroyed Ur c. 2000 BCE, as recorded in the Lament for Ur. According to Sitchin, the "gods" of the Anunnaki were the rank and file workers of the colonial expedition to earth from the 12th planet, also known later, through the Babylonians, as Marduk. The Nephilim "gods" were the commanders of the operation. The Anunnaki performed the menial labor, mining ores and building bases, while the Nephilim issued the orders setting these tasks into motion. It was only due to an uprising by the Anunnaki against the Nephilim in protest of these conditions that the Anunnaki 'workers' revolted against their overseers. Because of this the Nephilim and Anunnaki came together in a project to blend the DNA of Homo erectus with that of their own, thus giving rise to the Homo sapiens. Some of this theory is based on the idea that we have not found a "missing link", on the Sumerians' knowledge of the solar system, and on the Sumerians' crediting their knowledge and crafts directly to the gods.


Compiled & edited by David Slone <a href="http://www.honestinformation.com">www.honestinformation.com</a> from the public domain. Portions of this entry are from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article Bel.
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The Annunaki