Zecharia Sitchin's claim that Sumerian tablets describe a twelfth planet and the beings who came from it to mine Earth's gold.
Documented
The tablets are real; the translation is contested
In The 12th Planet (1976) and six sequels, Sitchin argued that the Sumerian word Anunnaki means 'those who from heaven to Earth came', that the planet Nibiru crosses the inner solar system every 3,600 years, and that humans were engineered as a mining workforce. He cited cylinder seal VA243 as a depiction of twelve solar-system bodies.
Assessment: The tablets exist; his rendering of them is rejected by working Assyriologists, who note that standard dictionaries give 'princely offspring' for Anunnaki and that the seal's dots match known star conventions, not planets. Sitchin's knowledge of the texts was real, self-taught, and outside the discipline, which is why the debate never resolved: both sides talked past each other for forty years.
Interesting claims
Humanity is a genetically engineered labor force
The full narrative: 450,000 years ago the Anunnaki arrived, found the toil unbearable, and spliced their own essence into a primitive hominid to create workers. The Great Flood was a management decision. The gods of every pantheon are the same family, feuding over the project.
Assessment: A magnificent edifice on a single contested translation. Nothing in genetics, geology, or astronomy supports a 3,600-year orbit or an engineered origin, and no tablet says what the theory requires without Sitchin's own gloss. The most influential modern myth of the pre-internet era, and the direct ancestor of every Anunnaki meme circulating now.
Stories
The stories the tablets actually tell
Strip Sitchin away and the Sumerian myths are already extraordinary: kingship lowered from heaven, cities with reigns of 28,000 years before the flood, the gods debating whether to wipe out a noisy humanity, Utnapishtim loading his boat with the seed of all living things.
Assessment: Documented in the standard translations, and the genuine article. The real tablets are stranger, better written, and more disturbing than the space-mining version. The folk tier here is the original mythology itself.
Sources and further reading
Enuma Elish tablet VI, the Anunnaki decree
Atrahasis tablet I, the Igigi labor and the Anunnaki
Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet, 1976
Worth asking
Cylinder seal VA243 shows dots around a central figure. Is it a solar system with twelve members, as Sitchin insisted, or just the stars artists always drew, and who do you trust to count?