Ancient Sumerian Texts Describe Creatures from the Sky — Who Were They?

In 1849, a man dug up a library buried for 2,500 years. Inside were thousands of clay tablets describing beings who came from the sky, a massive flood, and strange cycles of time. There was also a mysterious prophecy that may make us rethink the way we live. The explorer was Austin Henry Layard. He was digging through the ruins in northern Iraq when his team found something that took scholars more than 30 years to understand. It was a library that belonged to an ancient king named Ashurbanipal. Inside, there were tens of thousands of clay tablets, and some of them had already been ancient by the time the king was born. When the researchers first pulled those tablets out of the ground, nobody could read a single word, which made them wonder who had actually written those things in the first place. Long before this library existed, there was a civilization that basically invented everything we call civilization today. First cities, first written language, one of the first organized agricultures. And then, for some mysterious reason, they vanished so thoroughly that the rest of the world forgot they ever existed for almost 2,000 years. We call them the Sumerians. They lived in southern Iraq between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. And they built pretty large cities there, Uruk, Eridu, Ur, Lagash. One of them, Uruk, even had a population of around 40,000 people by 3200-3100 BCE. That made it the biggest city on the entire planet at the time. Now here's where things get really strange. Because the Sumerians left behind detailed written records claiming they didn't actually invent their own civilization. According to their own writing, someone gave it to them. They called those beings the Anunnaki, some researchers translated to those who came down from the sky. The Sumerians supposedly believed there was a huge dome or barrier over the world. It separated us from some beings. But apparently, that barrier wasn't supposed to stay closed forever. One of the tablets described 12 points in the sky, basically like a giant countdown. The first 11 could be matched to specific positions of the Moon, planets, and stars. But then there's the 12th one. And, of course, that's the part that's badly damaged. According to the surviving text, when that final point is reached, the dome opens, the covering above gets pulled back, and people down here can finally see what's hidden above us. After that, those beings, likely Anunnaki, will come down too. And then there's this thing called the Mi. In Sumerian stories, Mi basically means the powers and knowledge that make civilization work. Things like writing, law, craftsmanship. And the damaged part of the tablet seems to say that when the dome opens, these Mi could be given back, changed, reassigned, or even taken away. So this isn't really a simple the-world-is-going-to-end prophecy. It's actually much stranger. The barrier opens, the beings above return, and something changes between them and humanity. And here's the most frightening part. The 11th point supposedly lines up with a rare alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon. One that's expected to happen sometime this century. But the 12th point is too damaged, so we can't get an exact date from it. Other researchers think it's another astronomical event. Others think it could be a number of days, months, or years that you have to count after the 11th point. So we don't actually know when this is supposed to happen. Anyway, mainstream historians have a very simple explanation for all this. They believe the Anunnaki were just deities invented the same way every other ancient culture invented their divine beings. Like Zeus in Greece. Or Odin in Scandinavia. Or Ra in Egypt. But there's one detail that makes people question that explanation. The Sumerians didn't describe the Anunnaki the way other ancient cultures described their deities. They didn't surround them with myths and legends. They described them almost like co-workers. With real names and specific ranks. They wrote about the disputes the Anunnaki had with each other, and about the moments some of them decided to leave. It honestly reads like an ancient staff directory or an administrative record. But let's get back to that buried library. The king who owned it, Ashurbanipal, was unusual for his era. Because he could actually read in two different languages. Meanwhile, most rulers back then were completely illiterate. Ashurbanipal sent agents all over the ancient world, having instructed them to track down and copy old texts. He wanted to gather thousands of years of human knowledge, all in one place, under his roof. Sadly, in 612 BCE, his city was destroyed by enemies, and the library burned to the ground. But wait, there's a twist. Clay doesn't burn the way paper or papyrus does. Fire can't destroy clay tablets. It actually hardens them, almost like a kiln. So, instead of turning to ash, this entire library got baked in the fire and was buried under the wreckage. It remained there, completely preserved, for the next 25 centuries. When Layard's team, and later his successor, Hormuzd Rassum, finally dug it all up and shipped it back to London, nobody on Earth could actually read the writing anymore. Cuneiform, wedge-shaped scripts pressed into wet clay was a completely lost language. And once an entire generation of linguists, working in shifts for years, began to finally crack it, they realized something even stranger. The tablets weren't written in just one language. There were several, layered on top of each other. And the oldest layer was written in a language that didn't match anything else known on the planet. It was Sumerian. But the story gets even more unbelievable. In 1872, self-taught translator George Smith was working through a stack of those tablets in the British Museum. One of them completely stopped him in his tracks. It described a massive flood. It was a flood sent by deities, meant to wipe out humanity. One specific man, chosen to survive it, was instructed to build a massive boat. Animals loaded on board, two by two, and a bird was eventually released to search for dry land. Smith was staring at the original flood story, written down at least a thousand years before that same story appeared in the Book of Genesis. And it wasn't even the strangest thing in that collection. But to really understand the strangest part, you first have to understand how the Sumerians thought about time itself. They didn't picture history as a straight line. They thought of it as a repeating cycle. And according to their own writing, those Anunnaki beings had supposedly been visiting Earth for hundreds of thousands of years before that first mention. They arrived and departed on some kind of reoccurring schedule. The Sumerians measured those long cycles using a unit called a sar, which was equal to 3600 of our years. And according to a document, historians call the Sumerian king list, the earliest kings, before that whole flood thing, supposedly ruled for a combined 241,200 years. Well, divide that by 3600, one sar, and you'll get a suspiciously round 67 sars. So this wasn't just a random big number. It was written using their actual formal time unit. Scientists still argue about what it actually means. Mainstream historians see the pre-flood rain lengths as symbolic, more mythology than fact. But there are other theories. According to one of them, the cycle the Sumerians described was tied to some kind of giant object out in deep space. The Sumerians called it Nibiru. We can translate it as the crossing. The theory claims that this mysterious object followed an extremely long and looping orbit that supposedly brought it close to Earth every few thousand years. And whenever it got close, according to the theory, the Anunnaki would return to visit. This idea is not accepted by mainstream historians, archaeologists, or astronomers. There's no astronomical evidence that planet Nibiru exists anywhere in our solar system. That's it for today! So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends. Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the Bright Side!