Sumerian and Akkadian texts, excavated and deciphered after the Behistun inscription unlocked cuneiform in the 19th century, describe the Anunnaki under Anu, Enlil, and Enki; the creation of humans as workers in the Atrahasis epic; the watering of the plain of edin; and a flood survivor, Ziusudra or Utnapishtim, loading a boat. These tablets predate the Genesis redaction by a millennium or more. The structural parallels with Genesis 1-9 are standard syllabus in Assyriology.
The decipherment story deserves its own card: Henry Rawlinson, an army officer, copied the trilingual Behistun inscription off a cliff in Persia in the 1830s, with local helpers dangling on ropes, and spent years cracking cuneiform from it. Every Anunnaki theory ever aired descends from a man hanging off a mountain copying scratches.
Wallis's reading: Genesis is the Sumerian archive cut down and re-authored, the committee of Sky People compressed into one God, the workers' revolt erased, the managers' violence attributed to divine justice. The Bible is not the original; it is the remembered version, and the Behistun decipherment accidentally recovered the unredacted file.
When two archives tell the same creation and the older one names its gods as a working committee, which version is the theology and which is the report?