The Anunnaki were a changing collective of Mesopotamian gods—not one fixed roster. Sumerian texts use forms such as Anuna; Akkadian texts use Anunnaku. Their roles vary by city, period, and composition: great gods, divine judges, or deities associated with the netherworld.
“Anunnaki” is a modern conventional spelling. There is no single ancient “Book of the Anunnaki,” and surviving texts do not describe them as extraterrestrials who engineered human DNA.
There are two different answers. In Mesopotamian religion, the Anuna/Anunnaki belong to the divine order of heaven, earth, the Abzu, and the netherworld. In the modern ancient-astronaut story, they are visitors from a planet called Nibiru. The second idea is a twentieth-century reinterpretation, not a translation found on a surviving tablet.
Included because the theory is culturally influential—not because the archive grades it as an ancient fact.
Divine powers, offices, arts, institutions, and norms that structure civilization. They are not described as mechanical devices or computer chips.
A mythic emblem of authority and command over cosmic order. Calling it a control panel is a modern analogy, not a tablet translation.
Gods and rulers may possess terrifying splendor or radiance. Literary brilliance and awe are not evidence for radiation or electric fields.
Storms, floods, nets, maces, winds, and celestial fire function as mythic weapons. Texts do not supply reproducible engineering diagrams for them.
Atra-ḫasīs and related traditions use clay, divine substance, birth-goddess imagery, and ritual. “DNA laboratory” is not the language of the source.
Canals, mud brick, the wheel, sailboats, plows, kilns, bronze, writing, surveying, mathematics, and astronomical recordkeeping are archaeologically documented.
The term names groups of gods whose composition and function shift across texts.
Some literary works place Anuna deities in assemblies or judgment scenes.
Nibiru is an astronomical term with changing referents, not a documented alien homeworld.
No accepted Sumerian or Akkadian passage describes laboratories, DNA, or engineered humans.
Continue the story in the chapters below, or explore all six parts.