The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.7

The Anunnaki: What the Tablets Say, and What Was Made of It

This episode reads the Babylonian creation text known as the Epic of Atrahasis, in which lesser gods strike over forced labor before humans are created from clay and divine blood to bear the yoke. It connects this myth to history's first labor strike, recorded by Egyptian scribes in the twelfth century BCE, when Valley of the Kings tomb-workers sat down over stalled grain rations. The episode dismantles Zecharia Sitchin's 1976 claim that the Anunnaki were extraterrestrials mining gold, showing the divine marker on their name in cuneiform matches the one used for ordinary city gods. It closes on what is at stake in stories like this: whether we trust our ancestors with their own inventions.