The Sumerians They are famous for the great cultural advances they bequeathed, including their advanced knowledge of astronomy. Around it there is a controversy: own development or intervention? alien? We open the discussion.
more than 5000 years ago
There is a somewhat disturbing image created by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago. As is known, the Sumerians were one of the oldest human civilizations. They settled on the low Mesopotamiawere avid observers of nature, and the first to develop the writing.
As for their vision of the world, they often coincided with that of the egyptians, whose culture developed not far from theirs. Both cosmologies imagined a static world, where the predominant elements were the sky and the earth, surrounded by the Sun and the Moon. Within that world, each town was thought of as the center of everything known, surrounded by the chaos of the foreign.
sumerian astronomy
The sumeriansjust like the Mayans or the Egyptians, were great sky watchers. The regularity of the stellar movement was something that everyone registered with divine respect and studied with curiosity. However, the formulation of astronomical theories it would be something typical of modern science, despite some exceptions. In general, the observation of the stars acquired religious nuances, or sometimes their annotations served for the temporalization of daily life.
It is therefore not surprising that ancient peoples recorded very well the movements of celestial objects such as Jupiter wave Moonbut that they did not develop the idea that there were planets rotating around the Sun. They only observed and used their common sense, which told them of a Land still, through whose sky paraded stars of unknown origin.
That is why this image was disturbing for more than one. In it, as the background of a scene, a star with points can be clearly seen surrounded by small spheres that rotate around it.
There is hardly a clearer picture of what is for us the Solar system. It is not too far from the drawing that we would draw to quickly explain the heliocentric system to a child. That’s not all, for some researchers, the spheres seem to curiously coincide in their proportions with the sizes of the nine planets of our system and their most important satellites.
Could it be possible that the Sumerians developed the heliocentric theory and known all the planets of our solar system? The answer is no. Beyond the epistemological limitations, the Sumerian astronomical observations recorded the planets that we can only observe with our eyes, a lens incapable of capturing the signals of Neptune, UranusY Pluto.
The Sumerians only knew what was visible to the naked eye on clear nights. In this way, stars like Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto They were called “igigi” or “vigilantes”, Venus being the goddess Inanna. For his part, Nannar was to them what the Moon is to us. Likewise and, to separate different types of elements, they divided the space that was from their feet to the firmament into 3 parts: The first was under the domain of Enki and represented the ground, the second symbolized the kingdom of An and symbolized the sky. , while the third part was under the control of Henil and already reached the firmament.
Despite the fact that this seems to be strong evidence to rule out that the image refers to the Solar System, there is no lack of characters that invoke the intervention alien in the matter. Such is the case of the Russian author Zecharia Sitchinwho maintained that the image was inspired by the knowledge that only an alien race could have, and that it would have been in direct contact with the Sumerians, who would have also transmitted the principles of agriculture, metallurgy, and writing.
It is not difficult to take the Sumerian example and use common sense to explain things. The need to resort to external and fanciful factors to explain an engraving on a stone seal is totally unnecessary from the point of view of logic (occam’s razor), and absurd from common sense. However, the image is still a star surrounded by spheres of different sizes and orbits, and its true interpretation will forever remain a mystery.
The Sumerian Gods
From the Sumerians we inherit many small traces of their passage through the world, however, it should be noted that they did not attract attention like the ancient Egyptians, since they did not extend their monuments or erect imposing obelisks, huge sphinxes or majestic sculptures. The archaeological discoveries they tell us that they observed the cosmos in their own way and that they worshiped a very limited group of Gods. These are:
utu: God of the sun.
An (or Anu): God of the sky.
Nammu: The mother-goddess.
Inanna: The goddess of love and war (equivalent to the goddess Ishtar of the Akkadians).
Enki: God of beneficence and sweet water from deep underground.
nanny: Moon god in Ur.
Enlil: God of the wind.
Nin.Mah: Exalted Lady.
Nin.hur.sag: Lady of the mountain head.
To understand the presence of the Sumerian Gods in the archaeological finds, we must first know the symbols with which they are represented. The Sumerian pantheon was headed by An “star”, whose sign was distinguished by being a vertical line that was crossed by others horizontally and diagonally. The Sun God was accompanied by his sons Henil and EnKi, who together formed the most powerful deity.
The relationship of the Sumerians with the “extraterrestrials” began from the first moment that this ancient civilization was known. Historians and enthusiasts of the ancient peoples did not believe some of the archaeological treasures that were being found. It is interesting to note the discovery of the sumerian skulls, whose skulls were unusually very different from human ones. The skulls were more elongated than expected and represented some deformities. Even in the Near East several statuettes of Sumerian gods whose skulls are much longer than ours were found.
These skulls were not only unearthed in the settlements where the Sumerians reigned, but they were also discovered in much more distant places, such as in Peru (they can be seen in the Archaeological Museum of Lima and in the Ica museum). Besides having cone shape, the skulls show very different dimensions in the eye sockets, rounder and oversized. Opinions dance from one side to another; many believe that they are aliens who died along with the Sumerian people, while others argue that these deformations were carried out on ancient rituals. Apparently, in the rites, tablets with leather bands were used to press the skull of the children, since they were still small and their bones were soft, easy to mold in the image of the Gods.
The Sumerians were one of the first civilizations to practice writing and show interest in the origin and destiny not only of their race, but of all the elements that surround them.
In the Near East a Sumerian book called ‘The Gilgamesh poem‘, whose pages are today considered the oldest in history. Although there were still more than 3,000 years to go before the birth of Christ and, consequently, the arrival of the first Bible, the story of Gilgamesh has many similarities with the latter. It was a story from Mesopotamia of Sumerian origin, where Gilgamesh (fifth King of Uruk) and his friend Enkidu talked about immortality and the possible arrival of a flood on Earth. The book was written about clay tablets and cuneiform writing, which favored its preservation to this day.
The astronaut or ancient alien hypothesis
The one known as ancient alien or astronaut theory or hypothesis It is a pseudoscientific idea that defends that, during Prehistory and Antiquity, aliens established some type of contact with human beings, transmitting certain knowledge that caused the development of different civilizations and that were the germ of different types of cultural advances, scientific and architectural The defenders of this theory indicate that, following this idea, the gods of the ancient cultures coming from the heavens or from other kingdoms parallel to the terrestrial one would not be divinities as we generally understand them, but would represent the beings from other worlds who had provided them with knowledge that had improved their lives.
Thus, for example, Erich von Däniken argues that certain constructions of some ancient civilizations are so impressive and were so technologically advanced for their time that it is impossible that the people who lived at that time were solely responsible for their creation, since, according to him , they didn’t even have the toolsnor the techniques, nor the knowledge necessary to make them a reality. For this reason, he defends that said constructions (among which he includes the famous pyramids of Giza, the Stonehenge complex or the famous Moai of Easter Island) had to be carried out by beings from other planets who did have sufficient means to do so or by men who had received everything necessary to make them come true from said extraterrestrial beings.
The so-called theory of the Sumerian aliens has become very popular among the defenders of the existence of extraterrestrials that have arrived on Earth and have become very famous thanks to the Internet, being known even by people who do not have a special interest in the subject of aliens or who consider the theories related to them little more than pure fantasy. It is especially linked to the interpretation that Zecharia Sitchin has made of some Sumerian remains that have come down to us, although it also drinks from the ideas that we have presented in the previous paragraph, given the enormous cultural advance for the time that the Mesopotamian civilizations of the Antiquity. In particular, Sitchin argues that the gods worshiped by the ancient Sumerians were really “visitors” or “astronauts” from the planet nibiruwhich continues to exist and move around the sun, even though modern astronomers have never found any evidence of its existence.
This theory defends that aliens from this planet inhabited the Earth long before the appearance of man, with the main objective of achieving raw materials to take back to their home planets. Specifically, Sitchin talks about how they were 50 Anunnaki those who came to the area of Mesopotamia to obtain products such as gold or metal. In order to help them with that task and take over the heavier jobs, they decided create the human being. However, they did not manage to create a Homo Sapiens at the first attempt, but instead carried out various tests until they reached modern man, to which the different fossils and remains found to date would correspond, representing the evolution of man over the centuries. .