The Whole Shebang

The Anunnaki Affair: Between Myth and Reality

• Bailey R. • Season 1 • Episode 12

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In this episode of the Whole Shebang podcast, hosts Bailey and Raquel dive into Ancient Aliens, Season 6 episode 3, titled 'The Anunnaki Connection'. Raquel a PhD candidate specializing in Mesopotamian archeology. Together, they debunk the episode's claims about the Anunnaki, genetic engineering, and ancient astronaut theories, drawing on factual evidence and expert analysis. Despite the entertaining narrative, they highlight the show's misuse of historical facts and artifacts, lack of credible experts, and the problematic blending of various religious myths. The discussion covers topics such as misinterpreted artifacts, false representation of ancient texts, and the sensationalism found in these popular pseudoscientific programs.

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Welcome back everyone. I'm Bailey. And I'm ml, and this is the whole Shebang podcast. On today's episode, we watched Ancient Aliens, episode three, season six, the Anki Connection. We're going to be talking about our reactions and the actual facts. And here with me today is ricky, our resident archeologist.

Raquel:

So I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. And I specialize in Mesopotamia. Archeology, text, art, literature, languages, so many languages. And how many languages do you

Bailey:

speak again?

Raquel:

Modern or ancient? Both. Including English or excluding English? English is a given. Eight, but multiple dialects in multiple languages. Okay.

Bailey:

So yeah, join us as we dive into this episode because this one, the occu. Connection.

Raquel:

Actually, she has it written down, has to go double check.

Bailey:

The Anki connection deals with ancient Mesopotamia, which is your field of expertise,

Raquel:

and even more so it talks about Mesopotamian religion, which is what I'm writing my dissertation on.

Bailey:

So we figured we'd watch it and break it down. We wrote notes. You wrote six pages? I wrote three. Eight with pictures I didn't go that in depth. I did research.

Raquel:

You're welcome.

Bailey:

So why don't you start off,

Raquel:

I think

Bailey:

you start off.

Raquel:

You can ask questions and I can later go through my notes and figure out what we haven't talked about.

Bailey:

So the Anunnaki was, ancient people or Gods, so to say, and they based this episode loosely or around Zacharia Chen's books,

Raquel:

which are fun read.

Bailey:

They're a fun read, very religious. I listened to a couple of them and they like break down the religious sides of things, and it was, quite hard to get through interesting concepts. I did actually purchase and I own one of his books, bought it years ago called DNA of the Gods and we'll kind of get into that, but it was basically the Anunnaki, genetically engineered humans. To come down to Earth and mine for them, so we were like their slaves. That's kind of the premise around this and where, where it's all going. But we'll get into this. Okay, so this episode,

Raquel:

it's a really good thing. They can't see my face yet because I know I'm making some good ones.

Bailey:

Yeah, you're making some really good faces. Obviously you believe in none of this, which I will also say don't believe in any of this. It's really farfetched. Do your research, do a lot of research. We'll actually talk about a couple of the researchers today and what they actually specialized in spoiler, it was not ancient Mesopotamia. Of course not. Why would they have actual archeologists that studied the subject on their TV show? No clue on the History

Raquel:

Channel.

Bailey:

The fact that it's on the History channel kind of blows me away I think people are going for the mystery and it is supposed to be entertainment, let's highlight and underline that word entertainment. Mm-hmm. Which usually is not based in facts because facts can be pretty boring.

Raquel:

Yeah. And in our next podcast episode we're gonna talk about one of the more recent from, I believe it's season 20, which is on a similar topic. And the clips I saw were very similar to this episode. So we're gonna watch it and see how similar and how much of this stuff they're reusing and if they put anything new in it, which will be kind of fun.

Bailey:

Yeah, I think that would be interesting. So as we started watching this episode, one of my first notes we should probably mention, we watched it separately. mainly because I wanted to bring these topics together. And I know that if we had just watched it together, we probably would've done the whole podcast and then had to reiterate and lost. Some of the good conversation points that I'm sure we're

Raquel:

gonna have, and we hear your feedback on the ancient Apocalypse episode. We're fixing it.

Bailey:

We're fixing it. We got some stuff. We're doing some stuff. And we are planning reactions. So you can watch it with us. Exactly. And hopefully we will not give away the entire podcast. But you know what, that's what the YouTube's for.

Raquel:

Yep.

Bailey:

So, okay. One of the main things, they start off talking about Israel and the war with the United States in 2003. And the ransacking of the museums. And how there were people going in ransacking that had head pieces like they were a part of the military. So first note I have was. Why the military would be going in and destroying these artifacts. And they're kind of portraying it in a way, like they didn't want these secrets to get out. And I personally think that's false. I think that the museums were ransacked. I'm not familiar with Iraq and the war. But I don't think that there were people going in and destroying it because it held some untold secrets from this ancient civilization so that was my first point that I wrote down.'cause I do not believe that the military was going in there. I do believe that there was obviously people going and destroying works. Getting them to resell them, like that happens today in a lot of museums. But point on point, I don't think the military was going in there to prevent this information from leaking out because it would rewrite history, okay. What are your thoughts on that though? You're giving me some looks. I am giving you

Raquel:

some looks. So I put showing modern things to make it relevant, which is a great way to put your research out there. It's something I'm terrible at but a lot of people are experts and this show is no different. the Iraq unrest and mentioning the looting of artifacts, stolen objects from the museum, emphasis on the tablets that were stolen, which is used by ancient aliens to create an air of mystery. so why are people destroying objects from the past? Their answer in the show is that they're trying to hide the secrets. So Bailey just told us According to archeologists, most artifacts are from the Sumerian time period. And that's gonna be one of my biggest complaints as we go along, and I'm not going to dwell on it now. So my points here, a that no, they're not all from the Sumerian time period. Most of them in fact, are not. There are very few artifacts left in the world from the Sumerian time period because we haven't excavated a ton of places that go down that deep. So most of the objects that are actually Marion Sumerian are probably in the British Museum. So that's 0.1, 0.2. If you think about how ISIS destroyed certain. Landmarks, say the pal of Nineveh, ISIS's motives for destroying cultural heritage, they claim is to remove images of other gods because there's only one true God. But there's another aspect apart from beheading, people at these sites and mass graves and all these horrible things that are also going on with the human interaction, when heritage is destroyed, it gets a lot of attention.

Bailey:

Yeah, that's true.

Raquel:

destroying these cultural sites is their means for gaining a global audience, which is sad that we are more concerned about the heritage sites than the people And there's a lot of really interesting research done and discussions from other archeologists who talk about this. we should acknowledge the loss of human life as the most tragic event that happened. Not the destroying of the cultural sites. All of these cultural sites are well documented. We have pictures, we have measurements. We can recreate them if we absolutely have to. The fact that human lives were taken is much more serious. But this is an issue and it gains global attention when you start bombing these ancient sites. so that's why they pick these predominantly. But also it's to deface the figures and try to remove themselves from their ancestors. In this area of the Near East, there's a disconnect between the ancient people and the modern people. They're not the same. Why they are stolen from museums is a whole other story. And I am part of a lab that works on looted heritage. So we talk about this a lot, valuable pieces. So we started thinking about the illegal art market, why objects are stolen Why you hire guards, why if you have gold, the police are usually on site as well. still happens. The looting of archeological sites is very, very common, unfortunately, and especially in places like Iraq and Syria, Have these war torn places and people who need money, If you know that fancy white archeologists are digging over there and they're paying a lot of money and suddenly they leave and there's no guards, there's probably something you can find, whether it be gold or tablets. These things sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars online and it's really, really horrible.'cause it takes it out of the archeological context, which is something we don't think about a lot in say, places like Britain when you use your metal finder to find coins and things. But that's also the same idea as you are taking it from its context and now it changes the meaning. if I have a tablet about, say, the flood myth,'cause we really like the flood myth. If you find the flood myth in a temple versus a school, There's gonna be different context. Is it a religious text if it's found in a school and there are copies or is it a made up story versus if it's in a temple, maybe it has a little bit more religious context. There's a reason that temple is an institution is collecting it. So these things change how we view stuff. and obviously clay tablets are the size of your hand. They're very easy to smuggle, which is really unfortunate. and that's how a lot of museum collections even today collect objects. And there was over 10,000 objects taken from the Iraq museum that were returned. A lot of them made their way to the us. they entered into these art markets, the actual good auction houses, flagged them right away and said, this is from the museum. There's a record let's return it. But it was A huge deal and still is, there's still a lot of things that have not made it back.

Bailey:

That's very interesting.

Raquel:

We can do a whole podcast on looting

Bailey:

Here's my question. Have you ever looked on eBay?

Raquel:

Oh,

Bailey:

yeah. Have you found anything on eBay?

Raquel:

not really. while doing research for my dissertation, I've ended up on a lot of art auction houses, particularly in Britain and France. They're there. whether taken recently, mostly not so much. a lot comes from, if you found it in your grandma's house. now you're gonna sell it and your grandma would've had it legally because it wasn't illegal back then, so you could still sell it now. Interesting. And there's a lot of really weird laws about this. I think there's a cutoff date for, how legal it is and area wise as well. And I just actually did a project for a library, which I don't know if I can talk about quite yet, about finding provenance for a tablet. And I'm happy to share that once the exhibition is out in the fall.

Bailey:

that would be a great follow up podcast.

Raquel:

We can talk about the methodology I went through to find the information about the tablet.

Bailey:

Yeah, that'd be great.

Raquel:

Maybe we'll get something new.

Bailey:

But that was just my first point. That's what's going on with the museum situation. So I have a couple other questions. Was Samaria the first civilization? we touched on what civilizations were. in our last one, where we watched ancient apocalypse and what classifies as a civilization. So under those contexts was Samaria one of the first civilizations?

Raquel:

See, this is really hard because the deci factor is writing. Was Sumer the first place that we have evidence where there's writing? Yes. So then yes. Okay. If you're following that criteria, is it likely China had writing beforehand? they're very close. Okay. Egypt two very close. We're talking 50 to a hundred years off, very close in the timeline. If you exclude writing, then I would say probably not. Because you can probably count Neanderthals as a civilization then. Okay. And that excludes writing and monolithic structures. But we know even today there are still peoples who are not, they're still hundred gatherers. They're wanderers, they're people who move around. They live in tents. Do we count them as a civilization? Well, now we do. So that whole idea of what a civilization is is really foggy. But in our fancy white arm chairs that we're sitting here, I would say yes.

Bailey:

Okay. So that was one of the facts they got right in the show. Yeah. they touched on it and then left it. I was curious. The RO of.

Raquel:

Yep.

Bailey:

So tell what? It just showed pictures of the Zig garrot of er and they were all excited'cause they found it, but didn't really explain what it was.

Raquel:

What you're seeing in images and what they're showing on screen. there's a few that popped up that I was like Absolutely no. Is a reconstruction. So after they excavated the OT at ore, they rebuilt it. So it's kind of misleading when you see it'cause it looks very complete. It was a mound. secondly, that RO is from the first millennium, b, CE, and we're talking the Sumerians and the third millennium, b, c, e. So that's 2000 years difference. most of the things you see on the screen are from the first millennium when they're talking about the Sumerian civilization, which is 2000 years earlier. Huge problem there. Different cultures, different way of life.

Bailey:

even if you consider how we have a civilization have advanced from the 19 hundreds to today,

Raquel:

that would be like com saying that, smartphones are showing what technology looked like in, the Victorian era.

Bailey:

which is insane. The discrepancy in the

Raquel:

pictures is a big thing some temples at DU are rebuilt. We have previous layers, and the kings talk about rebuilding temples. one of their main tasks is to rebuild and make the temples better. So the OT is a huge step like pyramid that goes up and at the top you have a temple. That's all. It's, so, it's. You've seen the pictures. If you don't dunno what it looks like, Google it. You'll see a lot of it. Temple on the top, and then a bunch of gates around it. So the interesting thing about this is that they're actually able to excavate around it and they found the whole structure, including where the nun like women would live. They have the priest's houses, there's other temple structures around there. There's a gate around there. And then kind of towards that structure is the rural cemetery of, or which is why they're talking about the, is because it's connected to the cemetery, except not really. Okay. So it's meant to look like a mountain.

Bailey:

Good information. They didn't go into the RO or why exactly it was important.

Raquel:

They were just showing it as a pretense for the site.

Bailey:

Fantastic. Okay, my next question. I do take these shows. I love these shows. I watch them quite a bit, but I do take them with a grain of salt because as you're finding out, there is a lot of discrepancies in what they're telling you and only tiny spits of actual information. So my next one that I wanted to check with you were the Anunnaki mentioned on QA form tablets that you know of? Yes, they are.

Raquel:

They are.

Bailey:

So the Anunnaki were actually the gods that they worshiped?

Raquel:

Yes and no. This is what I wanted to talk about. Anunnaki is not a Sumerian term. That is a Acadian word, not a Sumerian one. The Sumerian culture they're talking about is the third millennium. These are small city states like or cpar, net port. All these, they're in southern Mesopotamia, which is southern Iraq, and they're right on the coast. the Acadian Empire comes in the late third millennium from kod and it becomes bigger and they expand their empire. They kind of briefly talk on this history and the episode, and then they're replaced by almost a neo Sumerian. Empires of the city state start to gain power again. This last. Couple hundred years. And then Rabi of Babylon comes in and he takes over and Babylon becomes main power. And then Babylon falls, and you have the Sea Dynasty and the cites, and then Assyria comes in and Assyria takes over, and then Assyria falls, and then Babylon takes over again. And then you have the pers very, very brief history of Mesopotamia in a minute. So you have the Sumerians and they invent things like writing and the wheel and math, the invented math. so very exciting. And then when AKA takes over, they assimilate into that culture. So then when the Acadian Empire falls, they try to regain what they had. At this point, they're probably not speaking to Marian anymore. they try to re bring back Sumerian, the king Soge. He really pushes to be like, this is who we are. We should be like this, and stop trying to be like them. That all collapses and then Sumerian and the Sumerian culture kind of becomes a fascination thing. It's like if you were in modern Italy thinking about your Roman ancestors, they are similar and a lot of things are borrowed. A lot of things are mixed, but they are different and there's a lot of different people coming in and different ideas coming in. eventually some people are probably still Nate Sum Marian, but distantly. You're talking thousands of years and people move. I had a professor really stress this idea of that, people do move. Why do we think of ancient people living in their one little hovel forever? That's not the reality of it. We see expansions in big cities fall apart, and then people go back into the countryside and they, we know they're trading all over the Middle East, into Italy Spain, even eventually. So, you know, this whole expansion, possibly even all the way to India already and the second millennium. They're not stagnant, so it kind of gets a little mixed, but they would claim themselves as ancestors of the Sumerians. Okay. So back to the. this term isn't attested in the Acadian period yet. So the first attestation is that Neo Sumerian that I just talked about, which is the fall of the Acadian Empire. And Anunnaki is an Acadian word. There is a term in Sumerian that comes up from text from this post Acadian period. So we're talking early second millennium again, a thousand years from the time that they're discussing. so the word in Sumerian is a nuna, close to Anunnaki, So the way that Anki is written in the K form. Is, in the Sumerian, it's written with a divine determinative. And noon, na key, a knee. the key and knee are suffixes not part of the word. so this is most likely an iteration on, key, which is a generative marker, and enon, a plural. so what happens is when they're trying to revitalize this Sumerian, they misinterpreted. And even later on when they start to look at it, they say, oh, this is the word. This is what it must have been in Sumerian. So we're talking, after this new Sumerian period, we forget the language pretty much. And we just reading it off of tablets. It's like Latin. Yeah. So then they're misinterpreting it and then putting it into Acadian in a different way. And this happens with my own dissertation figure as well, which is kind of an interesting process, but I think it's actually the other way around. They're putting it wrong in Sumerian in that one. So they're trying to keep this idea that the Sumerians have come up with, but the word is completely all over the place. It's a misread in Acadian. As for a translation, no one can agree. I did some research on this. The best one. Eventually I'll share all these with you. There's this beautiful it's the ORAC from the Penn Museum. They do a lot of really awesome databases of Canadian form archives. So this is the God list and I looked up the Anki, the group of Gods. And it'll gives a lot of resources on people who have tried to write about them there's no conclusion on what the terminology and the word actually means. There's some different interpretations. It's probably like the seed or something like that. Something to do with seeds or power, in text. So if I look at the text, which I pulled up here, both these are the Acadian ones. I'm showing Bailey right now. these are all Neo Sumerian texts. There's a lot of references. In every single one, the word is used to define a class of deities, titled Aki or Anuna. it'll be like Anky, the God who is the greatest of the Aki or the Aki sat in judgment. usually they're invoked as protection and this class is understood. we have multiple layers of deities and Mesopotamia AKI would be your higher class gods.

Bailey:

Okay. So in layman's terms, to translate what you've just told me, it's kind of like Zeus on Mount Olympus. They're the higher gods but there were many other minor gods that you don't really see in Olympus.

Raquel:

Yeah.

Bailey:

But yeah, so the Anunnaki would contribute or be a part of the higher.

Raquel:

Yeah. So if you, it's religion reflects what you see in real life. So the Anki are like your kings and your elite people. The lower gods would be counted as your male, predominantly male citizens. People who belonged. And then you have the foreigners your slaves, your servants, that group at the bottom. Mesopotamia is big on social hierarchy, different periods, but hierarchy is very important. same within the gods. my dissertation figure, which Bailey has heard too much about, is a very, very minor deity who's part of the class of demons in protective spirits. He's at the bottom, almost a slave. The Aki, the gods who are part of the Aki are the most predominant golf in Mesopotamia. They're the ones who have cities dedicated to them. So like for example, Anky who comes up in the show a little bit, or aa in Acadian, his seat is the city du He lives in du His main temple is du he's the patron god of that city. in Babylon, their patron God is Mar Duke. Okay, so Mar Duke rules there. It's also a way for them to structure like who's the better city or like who's in power when, and these stories we read about the gods are really reflections of, oh, they talk about enum s in the show. That's pretty much the whole. Story of Numa Elish is heightening Mar Duke and showing his rise to power over these other gods who all, at one point their cities had kingship and now it's explaining why Babylon has kingship. So it's very, you need to know about the history to understand what they're talking about.

Bailey:

And they don't actually go into much history before they start talking about it.

Raquel:

No, not at all. Okay. Sorry. Ramble

Bailey:

about the on That's okay. That was good. That answered my question. you sent me a text To ask if I found anything believable. Compelling facts that I found believable. most of the facts and the way they're speaking about them, they talk with a lot of confidence. It makes it more believable just from the way they're talking. So while I could say I didn't really believe much, it's probably because I went into this looking for things, right? But if I were to just sit down and watch it, like I did a lot when I was a kid. I remember sitting there and it was one of my favorite shows I just believed everything they said because they just talked about, it was such confidence, and it seemed like they were doing so much research and everything else. And I'm a conspiracy theorist. I'll give myself that. I believe in a lot of conspiracy theories, Uhhuh, but again, with a grain of salt, because I'm not gonna be the one going out there and proving them. It's all gonna be other people. So it's all gonna be hearsay. But the facts do present. As facts, even though, like Ricky was saying, they're not. Or they're off by thousands of years, I remember the facts being believable when I was younger because I went into it looking for flaws. I was seeing it everywhere.

Raquel:

Yeah.

Bailey:

But for an average person who's just sitting down to watch it, I could see how the show is very believable and how it would compel people To believe in what they're talking about. when they point out the ancient astronaut theorists, wanna highlight the line theorists theory needs information and proof It also needs to be tested and there is not really anything. To back it up cohesively or for them to test. Like when they talk about, oh, they came down and maybe they went back up in spaceships and that's how they got like away from the floods. There's gotta be something. There would

Raquel:

be something. They really threw spaceships in there. I was like, okay, sure, sure. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, they went off on spaceships. I'm like, okay. That's where you're losing me.

Bailey:

the images they show to the spaceships were these big hunks of like spaceships. if anything like that happened there would've been proof because there's no way just a few people would've seen these spaceships. They would've written about'em. It would've been the thing that they talked about for centuries. There was a point in the show showing a relief and he had something that looked like a watch. But the relief, also showed a flower in the watch type thing. And from my understanding of ancient cultures, which is slim to none, even in the Victoria period, people wore flowers to hide their smell. They weren't the cleanliest, like anything like that. it could have been. It wasn't a watch. You didn't see numbers, you didn't see dials. it was a thing that they wore around their wrist. Which is an accessory, which was popular in all cultures.

Raquel:

Fun fact, we have those from archeological evidence. Do you? Yes. And they are just flower pictures.

Bailey:

Cool. I am an archeologist now. Mm-hmm. And then I did, I, I wrote another thing down. I'm just saying my points and you're rebutting them at this point.

Raquel:

No, no. We'll go through my points after. We'll go

Bailey:

through your points. Okay. And then they start talking about genetic engineering by gods. Definitely sounds false. genetic engineering for us today is extremely difficult. with all our advancements if I was looking at this maybe they genetically altered us or created us as humans to be their slaves and mine for gold, which was what they had. We would see some signs with our genetic DNA, anything we would see a point where we were genetically altered, genetically made. We would be able to reproduce humans if we could decode the code So definitely false. I don't think we were genetically engineered except for, I don't know what you can all call it natural genetic engineering, how we evolved from what we are. Yeah. But in the way they're talking about, no, that's what I have to say about that. Just no. This is another thing I touched on. References of normally long lives. these gods or people living for 900 years, a thousand years, and go on and so forth in the Bible. It also does reference of abnormally long not lives. Right. Like 200 years, 300 years, so on, so forth. So my question to you, is it because they had a different method of recording time? That's an interesting thought because I know that the time we go by for our months and stuff like that, the Roman calendar was adopted around fifth century BC where we started to rec record time differently. I do believe before that, we went by lunar phases. Phases of the moon. Yeah. So whether that's right or not, you know, archeologists come from me in the comments. But I don't know. Was it just a way that they. Reference their time that made it seem longer. I wish that was the case because usually they lived shorter lives, eh? Debatable. But would they be living to their eighties, nineties, like

Raquel:

Now, there are several people from the ancient rule who lived to a hundred, and we are seeing it today. Whether that's an exaggeration, we don't know. the reason why we talk about people dying young is because the infant mortality rate is incredibly low. So your chance of living past the age of two is very slim. 25% of kids would've died. Fair. So that brings down your mortality rate. But the idea of having people, even in the medieval ages, like they were elderly people, we know there's elderly people. They talk about elderly people. Maybe not into their eighties. I think 60 is a good age to think about, especially the later you get into the first millennium. women died in childbirth a lot. So that adds to your mortality rate. if you're not a woman or a child and you make it past 10, as a male, you're probably gonna be in your forties, fifties. sometimes they didn't get married until past their teens. Like we always talk about, oh, they got married so young, but they didn't, not really, as for what we're talking about with these ages. I have it here, the Sumerian King list that they're talking about in the episode. And it does start, like if we look at the very first King, he ruled for 288,000 years.

Bailey:

They lived as long as Earth was created.

Raquel:

But then if we go down and we start getting the mix of kings from different places, ruling, we have 30 years, 15 years, four years, 43 years. it was much more reasonable,

Bailey:

much more reasonable and believable.

Raquel:

One thing about the Sumerian King list is it was written about a thousand years after this time is talking about, Like telephone, obviously they had some documents. There's a lot of different lists. There's various lists. This is how we've reconstructed King reigns and how we've, we've reconstructed their time periods. But they change. But to talk about these ridiculously long years, these ones even longer than the ones in the Bible. A lot of these very, very extravagant ones are before the flood. But then even after the flood, we still have people living for 900 2000 years. It's because they don't know. it sounds a lot more impressive if you're like, my first king rain for 200 and, two, 200,000 years opposed to two years. And then we also need to think about the purpose of these lists. why does somebody write a king list? What is its purpose? One is that you're trying to legitimatize your own rule. So if you're throwing facts and you're like, look at all this archeological evidence and these inscriptions from these kings, we can match how long they've reigned. But if we wanna prove we've been here forever, we're gonna make up some kings maybe a couple gods and famous kings like Gilgamesh give them outrageously long lifespans. we have attestations of a lot of them. this is fact, but not all fact. They exclude kings we know about. They don't mention all of them. the king list also shows us, tells us which cities was reigning for which periods. And in especially the Sumerian culture, they believe your time will come, there will be an end, and then the cycle will get renewed, but it'll be at a different place. So they're perfectly okay with, okay, now aga day has fallen, the Acadian Empire is gone. Now we're moving into another city in power. That's normal. So for them, this is their way of showing, this city had kingship then, but then it became this city and now it's this city and these are all the kings that range. it's fascinating that they pointed this out. I think it's to show, look, everybody lived for a long time, so they must be hybrids.

Bailey:

Yeah, hybrids or even the gods themselves.

Raquel:

in terms of archeological evidence, we can see that people, we have their bones. You can tell when someone is, in their thirties and they've died versus when they're a hundred. I did wanna share a fun fact though, which is why I ended up going through all of my old readings and stuff. So in the Chronicles of Early Kings, which is on a similar note to the Sumerian King list, it does actually mention a gardener who was named king after the king died. So in Mesopotamia, there's a substitute king ritual. If I have a bad omen saying that the king's gonna die, he can hire someone to be the king and die for him. So this poor gardener man is chosen to die for the king, and he is declared the king. And so he gets like crowned because then technically he's the king. So he's gonna be the one that Oman is talking about now instead of the other guy, and he's gonna die in place, right? Usually they would just kill him to get it over with, and that gets rid of the bad omans. But in this case, before they could do that, the guy who was the king died sipping his hot soup. And so the gardener suddenly became the king. And that is how his dy sea started.

Bailey:

That's kind of hilarious. Isn't it great? Why wouldn't you talk about that? Like this guy is now appointed king and he's like, great, this is not how I expected my Friday to go. And at his coronation or whatever, the king or the old king sips his soup and dies and he's like, shit.

Raquel:

And they were like, well, I guess you're the king now. I guess the other guy didn't have any heirs or something or who knows? But he is. Well, now you're king. The best rank to richest story I have ever

Bailey:

heard I

Raquel:

think is

Bailey:

pretty great. Yeah, I think that's an amazing fact.

Raquel:

Whether that actually happened. We don't know a lot of the times, you know, these kings who usurp, come from humble backgrounds. So Sargon the great, he was a cut bearer. We know that he took power, but they always come from this humble beginning. Same like the founders of Rome, Romulus, and Remus. They were, you know, abandoned from their priestess mother. Think about Moses, humble backgrounds. So it is a genre that comes up a lot.

Bailey:

I will now believe that until my death.

Raquel:

There you go. How did become king?

Bailey:

How to become king?

Raquel:

two easy steps.

Bailey:

Oh, he probably planted himself growing the food for the king

Raquel:

Well, yeah, he, I don't know what he put in that hot soup, but,

Bailey:

that's a fun story. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. So as we move on, this is when they start to mention Zacharia Chen Chen Chen Chen. So who was he really? He was a journalism and editor and he got a degree in economic history.

Raquel:

Yep.

Bailey:

That was it. He didn't study ancient Mesopotamia, and they say, oh, he read QA formm tablets for over 30 years. And he was an expert. No, that would be the same as me looking at, QA Formm tablet. And being like, you know what? I'm just gonna read the same thing for 30 years. And I'm gonna tell you what it says. I would have no education in it.

Raquel:

Did you also notice, Whenever they talk about his theories or his ideas and they say, he translated these tablets, they never actually mentioned which tablets.

Bailey:

Oh. You see, I didn't notice that. But to me, I'm like, well, if you never went to get education on how to read the tablets, how are you translating the tablets?

Raquel:

You can learn. It takes a lot of work, but people can teach themselves.

Bailey:

the fact that he had written so many books, To me, that seemed more of a gimmick. You know, like, I've read these tablets, oh yeah, these tablets support what I'm writing. So read what I'm writing

Raquel:

here. I even timestamped it 41 20 according to Chen's interpretations of Sumerian texts, blah, blah, blah. My comment, what? Text?

Bailey:

Tell us the text you studied. Well, they also showed reliefs of QA form and they're like, there's over 200 tablets around here and this must have been important on these great big reliefs that they had, which are also Ayn from the first millennium. Cool. So that's not even from the millennium they're talking about. Yep. 2000 years later. Their budget for the history channel must be sky high. Oh yeah. If they're like just jumping around, they could afford thousands of years worth of material scattered all throughout, What text texts from all over texts from thousands of years that they're just

Raquel:

My big issue is that when they are talking about tablets and things, and they're giving their evidence, they say in Numa ish, the King List, the Book of Enoch, they're titling their text. They're telling us where they're getting their evidence from, and as soon as they start talking about ci, it's just his Sumerian texts. Why? Why all of a sudden are we just not talking about which texts?

Bailey:

That too. So then of course, after we talk about stitching, whichever he is, I'm gonna mess that name up. We start talking about niru, which. If you haven't heard, there's been doomsday prophecies about nairu from him for a long time. Nairu, even today, is prevalent in any doomsday theories. I constantly see headlines popping up on my TikTok and stuff about Nairu coming, and we're all gonna die. And I'm just sitting here waiting. So the reason he was saying that the Anunnaki came to earth and genetically engineered these humans was to mine for gold to patch the atmospheric holes around the beru. Because the gods couldn't live there anymore. And so that's the comment that made me go, what the fuck? I wanna know where he's getting that from. Hey, we have a hole in our ozone. I mean, if we could get gold to patch that, that would be great. But did we give it all to the, an. But why gold? Exactly. Why gold. You think if there's such an advanced civilization, they're gonna be wanting something other than a basic mineral that's found. And so I did a little research on my own about Nairu.

Raquel:

Mm-hmm.

Bailey:

Because I was like, is Nairu an actual planet?

Raquel:

Yeah.

Bailey:

It's not. But what it could be, which makes way more sense, is the Polestar or ursa Minor. Which they could be referencing because as we know, a lot of ancient peoples, looked to the stars.

Raquel:

Astrology was huge in Mesopotamia. I kind of avoid it'cause it's very technical and very mathy. But I can send you all the texts

Bailey:

so it makes more sense that they would name this planet Nibiru and it's their mystical star that the Gods come from.

Raquel:

Sure. That sounds great in theory, but that's not reality.

Bailey:

No, no, no, no. I'm just saying there's

Raquel:

The Gods have always just been a part of earth.

Bailey:

I'm just saying that if we go onto his theories and niru quote unquote exists, which is does not, you're right. That could be one of the stars that they're referencing too. But is Nibiru ever mentioned in QA form tablets?

Raquel:

Nibiru is a word that means crossroads.

Bailey:

Yes. I looked that up too. And then we just took this name out of our ass pretty much.

Raquel:

Okay. I wondered if he's misinterpreting niru, which is a word for nippo. The city name.'cause there's a bunch of texts about these Aki gods like who go to Niru, which is the city nip or, and it is essentially a fab, like it's a story about the God traveling from his city to that city, which is a reference to the statue of the Divine, leaving the city and traveling around, which we know they did.

Bailey:

That makes a lot more

Raquel:

sense. So that was where I was wondering if he was getting it from, but I can't be certain'cause it's kind of

Bailey:

up there and he doesn't really say. Yeah, well it would definitely make sense'cause you said, what was the name? Ni Niru. Niru. It could definitely be just a mistranslation.

Raquel:

Because even this idea that the gods come from the heavens, that's not really true. Like some gods live in the heavens, but not all of them. Most of them live on earth. Some of them are in the heavens, sometimes some they travel around Gods move just as much as people do. Fair. So it's kinda, eh. And we've talked about why mythical things fly and live in the sky in our previous podcast episode.

Bailey:

yeah. So if you wanna hear that, go listen to, I think that's the paranormal episode. Is it the paranormal? Yeah.'cause we were talking about dragons. Ah, yes, we were. Same concept, different thing. Go listen to those two episodes. Our paranormal activities. And our Ancient apocalypse. Ancient apocalypse. Great episodes. So next on my list, and we actually talked a little bit about this before. We came up to record the enlarged skulls that they're talking about. Oh yeah. And so I'm gonna give you what my thoughts and interpretation is on it, and then you give me yours. Okay. So they're showing these enlarged skulls and saying, I think it was about how they crossbred with humans.

Raquel:

Yep.

Bailey:

So in a lot of cultures, people did types of things like that for cosmetic reasons.

Raquel:

Skull binding.

Bailey:

Yeah. Or it's just a birth deformity.'cause you know, it's, it's type coming out of there. You're gonna get a little deformed. Okay. You ever seen a newborn baby? They do not look like the cute, squishy, huggable things. They kind of look like they're aliens. But, an example of this, which is still performed today, is the can tribe from. Myanmar, Burma. They put rings around their necks to elongate their necks and then they add rings over time and then their body adapts and they have obviously very long necks, So like for cosmetic purposes or just deformity?

Raquel:

No evidence of that in Mesopotamia for cosmetics? No. It's possible that they performed it in Egypt, but it wasn't common. It's a stylistic feature of the art in Mesopotamia there. There's none of that.

Bailey:

Okay. And well, if we touch back on something you had said earlier with people traveling all over the place. Is this person even from. Sumer, or could it just be someone who was traveling and died there?

Raquel:

Yeah. So what we're talking about is they show a skull from the Royal Cemetery of Ore, which is excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. They say 1927. This book starts 1926 to 1930. So ish area. And he discovered this series of graves. There's hundreds of graves, various periods. The ones they're talking about are the royal ones from the early diagnostic period, which is the Sumerian period. And they're focusing on this skull of a queen named Pu Abi. And I have an image on my computer for Bailey to look at, to refresh her memory. This is what they showed is this very beautiful screenshot. And they highlight the head. Yeah. And they say, look at the weird shape. So I actually brought the, or excavations written by Sir Leonard Woolley because I am a little extra. So this is, grave PG 800 and he calls her Schu ad because they did not have the proper translation. So it's changed now how we translate the name. But I marked off this little tiny section where he actually talks about the herb bones. So he writes inside the chamber, a wooden briar stood somewhat, ask skew across the northwest end on it. Laid the body of queen tube abed or Pu Abby. she laid quite straight on her back, her head to the west. Her hands crossed over her stomach. A woman attendant was crouched by the side, near the head and a second at the foot. That's all he says about.

Bailey:

Oh, so there's no. Mention of any weird skulls, deformities,

Raquel:

But then he does mention skulls a little bit, so he explains that his wife, makes castor plastered like reconstruction so that they can hang the jewelry on. And you can see these at the pen and the bridge museum. We saw some of them actually. so he writes when his wife is modeling this woman's skull, that she needed to actually use one from a different site because the skull of this Queen Pu Abby, was too damaged in a condition to be used and therefore somewhat of an older skull. The same type was employed. So what they don't describe about ore is that it was these toes are under enough dirt that it would be the height of your house.

Bailey:

Dear Lord.

Raquel:

so if you imagine a skull under that much dirt. It is gonna be flattened.

Bailey:

It's gonna get crushed and deformed.

Raquel:

the reason it's a weird shape is because it's broken.

Bailey:

Oh

Raquel:

yeah. Again, makes tons of more sense. It gets even better. So the one that they're showing and insisting is Ppu. Abbi's Skull is, I have next to it, the colored version of the same image for Bailey to look at here. This is the skull they're showing. This is from the Great Death Pit, which is a completely different tomb at a completely different person. So here's a image I have for Bailey of the actual queen from the excavation. And you can see she's even more flattened and her skull is very much s sclar shaped.

Bailey:

History channel. What are you doing with this money? I would like to have some, can you not present at least one, one fact that is accurate for your time period?

Raquel:

And if you wanna see that image, it is a part of the archives at the Pennsylvania Museum available online. They also reference these cylindrical cone shaved hats. These are common crowns for gods. So Gods always, most definitely, especially these higher up gods have cones with six horns. That's all it is. it's like a cone hat. It has nothing to do with the skull. Like a dun cap. Yeah. So, so that's that.

Bailey:

Oh, so something I didn't like that they were doing was they were taking many different religions and trying to use it to prove their own theories. Yep. Which is a common theme, but at the same time, if you had the proof to support it, you could support it without using other religions.

Raquel:

Mm-hmm.

Bailey:

And in my opinion, religions are very similar. Like the flood myths you can find in almost every religion, the creation story, we were all created from something. And it's, yeah, I don't like how they did that. Like if you're gonna present theories, present your theories. But don't go and be like, oh, well in Christianity over here, and then, in India over here. And then like, oh, this all backs up our thing. Right? It's like, no, obviously they also have it. So what makes yours different?

Raquel:

Mm-hmm.

Bailey:

For me, you know, and my next note was the flood myth. Go back to ancient apocalypse. What? Listen to that. We talked about it. We talk about the flood myth and why flood myths are presented in almost every.

Raquel:

On that note, I have a point here and I'll show you Bailey, these images later.'cause it's gonna take too long to do it now. the pictures they show while talking about the flood myth were kind of interesting. They are all pictures from, Neo Ethereum palaces again 2000 years later. And, the one of them is a warfare picture. Another one is a collection of wood. And I don't know what those have to do with the flood, but those were the ones that were chosen.

Bailey:

Interesting choices.

Raquel:

Yep.

Bailey:

So my final note for my notes, were just, all of the people they had presenting and giving these quote unquote facts, most of them were authors. There were only two that had PhDs. One was Mary J. Evans. She had a PhD. And she had taught for, I think it was over 30 years, was environmental geography.

Raquel:

Oh.

Bailey:

And she was a personal friend of Zacharias Stitching.

Raquel:

It's pretty culty.

Bailey:

Yeah. Other than that one book, I think she published she wrote a lot of horse books. Lot of children's horse books. that was her credibility on the thing. Robert Mullins Was the other one. And he's in the Biblical Archeology Society. He studied at the Hebrew University. that was what he studied was basically the biblical

Raquel:

There's a lot of crossover, so I'll give him a, as credible as they could probably get.

Bailey:

And I'm pretty sure he was given a pretty penny just to talk

Raquel:

Oh, yeah.

Bailey:

So

Raquel:

when I'm ready to sell out, this is what I'm gonna do with my,

Bailey:

so yeah. That was, that was his credentials. Yeah. But better than I thought. Yeah. But still not, not an expert. Not an expert on Mesopotamia as a whole.

Raquel:

Yeah.

Bailey:

You know, or just in general with Mesopotamian

Raquel:

times. Mm-hmm. You

Bailey:

know, so, yeah. That's, that's all my notes. That's all the questions I had for you. Cool. We

Raquel:

covered a lot of the main things I was gonna point out, which is great. I was gonna say

Bailey:

it was with how you came at me with the information, I was like, I got it. I got the facts that she wanted to talk about. I don't like that you

Raquel:

can read my mind, but I'm gonna share my final thoughts and then a few other little inconsistencies that I noticed. I know we're probably going pretty far over time, so final thoughts. There are hardly any images from Sumerian art displayed throughout the episode. Maybe like two in 43 minutes.

Bailey:

Wow.

Raquel:

Everything was mostly new Ayan art and tablets, Neo tablets. They never mentioned the text that CI refers to. they only use a few points of evidence with little to no context of their actual evidence. Their information of the facts is spotty at best. Tablets are usually the right way up, but are occasionally displayed sideways for some reason, and their evidence is not great, which we talked about. So this tablet thing really, really pisses me off. And Bailey knows all about this because my students are sometimes guilty of this too. I mentioned the library earlier. One of their old publications had the tablet I was working on sideways. It happens a lot, but they do it inconsistently throughout the episode. I was really impressed at first because there's a five second clip of a reconstruction of someone writing in Canadian form and they're doing it the right way. Wow. The one thing they got right. Even Wonder Woman does it. Wrong. So I was like, Hey, kudos. And then like 10 minutes later, the tablets are all shown sideways. So that was fun. That gave me a good laugh. I was like, yeah. Okay. Let's go to the top of my notes and see what we've covered. Most of their facts are just odd. The things they point out and the things they ude. We talk a lot about finding this library full of ancient knowledge and all these thousands of texts, which is real. but it's in a Syrian library

Bailey:

again

Raquel:

he does collect checks from previous periods. We have a lot of them from him because Banani Paul sends out people to. Write out what they see in inscriptions. So not the worst piece of evidence they could throw at it. but again, they're talking about palaces from the Neo Assyrian period, the first millennium. and they talk about the sacking of ore from the Elamites, but they're showing pictures from Syrian palaces, which is in the city of shore. It was a little odd. Yeah. And I don't know why they brought that up. They also pronounce kind of interestingly, and my favorite is Anu, or as they say ama, and they really pronounce the ema EI found a couple dissertation figures that I didn't already have in my database, which was a little upsetting. Okay, so talking about auma s this is probably my last inconsistency. I also have myths from Mesopotamia by Stephanie Dolly, which everyone should go read. And in Auma s so they're talking about the creation of man and they say Mar Duke creates, humans using, blood and mud. But I actually just wrote a conference presentation on this and that I gave in the Netherlands. And in fact, this is one of the only creation stories that doesn't use mud to make humans. So that was kind of funny. I think they're misquoting another story, which is called au, which is these, cadian flood story where they do use mud. and in that story, the Anki create humans because the lower class of gods are whining too much than they have to work and tend to the fields. There's nothing but mines or gold, so I don't know where they're getting that from. So that was kind of fun. I'm just gonna double check to make sure we covered everything. They throw the Bible at it a lot to try to make it relevant. the way a ology, which is what I study in Sumer biology comes about, it's from biblical studies. It also started with a quest to find these biblical sites. So the fact that they keep referencing it isn't unusual, but it is something we've tried really hard to distinguish ourselves from, who's kind of annoying. And it's like, just focus. Just forget it. It doesn't contribute anything to their stories. we talked about the skulls. That one was funny. I had a good laugh at that. Interbreeding with humans. That's hysterical.

Bailey:

I mean, Give me night vision or something.

Raquel:

They also love to throw the flood at things I was surprised there was only one ancient astronaut theorists say yes.'cause you know, they conveniently say yes to the things you need them to say yes to. Okay. oh. The other big one, they're showing images of the aki, but they are not the aki they're showing images of. So these winged figures are just winged genies. These, again, come from these Assyrian palaces from the first millennium. And as far as I'm aware, I haven't seen many attested before the first millennium. They might be a little bit of Egyptian or Matan influence in there. And their protective figures, I have some theories. I'm not gonna share them because, people will steal ideas sometimes and I would like to publish on this idea eventually. One day maybe I'll talk about it. But yeah, no, if you're gonna show the on donkey show pictures of an or an lo, come on.

Bailey:

Yeah. if you're using him as your backbone basis kind of thing.

Raquel:

Exactly. And then, yeah, Noah built a spaceship to avoid the flood on an actual boat. That was funny. And then they brought up Mars and I was like, okay, I'm gone.

Bailey:

of course.

Raquel:

It was like the last maybe five minutes they started throwing all this really craziness at you. So they try to bury these ideas. In fact, that is incorrect. But it's believable. Yeah. And it is somewhat like, okay, we're talking about the cemetery of, or at least they're in the same site and you know, they're showing these pictures, which are real, and they're talking about these facts that are real sometimes, and then they throw in you. But, you know, they had their way station on Mars at the end, and I was just kind of, this is a weird way to conclude your, your story. Like, why it would be almost more believable if you left that stuff out.

Bailey:

Yeah, I was gonna say, so as I was watching this episode, I watched it all the way through and they had started talking about Mars. So I went to go grab a coffee, and then by the time I got back I started talking about something else and I was like what happened? But it ended the episode and I was like, are we done? is that it? Yeah, it made it end very abruptly and it didn't tie in at all.

Raquel:

When they were talking about, or they were showing pictures from various sites, again, different time periods, which is really funny. Some of the tablets they're showing are actually Sumerian. Some of them are definitely not, There's one particular piece that I have here for Bailey to see a screenshot of, which is an alien face is one of the actually only pieces of Sumerian art they showed, which is kind of funny. And it's a figure of a woman and probably the deity and nana from or not, So, you know, fact check I, all I did for a lot of these images to find out where they got them from, if I didn't recognize them, was I put them through a Google image search and voila. And often it would bring me to the museum website. So there are ways to do this.

Bailey:

Yeah. And for any of my information on the people with the PhDs or anything like that, I image search them.

Raquel:

Yeah.

Bailey:

And it would tell me what, you know, their PhD's in and everything like that. So even for people who you think are credible, check.'cause they are certainly credible, but not in the area that they're attesting to be credit

Raquel:

credible. You can check my credentials as they are on the U of T website and academia and LinkedIn and Facebook. I have a publication. It's a very, very, minor one from a conference, but I do present at conferences. So go ahead, check.

Bailey:

Exactly. Always double check your facts, especially when it comes to these shows. And then find Bailey while you're at it. You won't ever be able to find me. I am incognito. But you know what, we're gonna wrap this up for today. drop us a comment, look in the very near future for our YouTube channel, which will go under the whole shebang on YouTube. Cheers guys.

That's all for today. Catch us on Instagram where we drop teasers for the next show and our Discord account links are down below.