Did the Anunnaki create humans? In this live stream Billy Carson argues that they did not create humanity from nothing: according to the tablets, he says, the Anunnaki used genetic manipulation to alter a species that already existed. He also walks through the Enuma Elish, defends his sources against the charge that the story is Zecharia Sitchin's invention, and introduces the Igigi, the overworked lower gods whose complaint sets up the creation of humans.
The question sits at the centre of the modern Anunnaki debate, and it rests on real texts. Mesopotamian tablets do describe the gods making people to take over their labour: the Atrahasis epic is the primary source for that motif, and Tablet VI of the Enuma Elish gives a later Babylonian version starring Marduk. What divides readers is whether those passages are mythology, as Assyriologists read them, or a distorted record of real events, as Carson argues. For the wider background, see [Who Were the Anunnaki?](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory)
What the video covers
The misconception
Carson opens by saying the question is usually framed badly. "According to the text, they didn't create humans," he says, meaning they did not conjure people out of nothing by magic or some power of creation. "They use genetic manipulation," he continues, promising to show one of the earliest recorded accounts of it.
Who the Anunnaki were
Carson treats Anunnaki as a general term for beings who came to Earth from elsewhere, much as a human on another planet would say "earthling" rather than name a home city. In his view the Anunnaki and the Atlanteans are the same people: Anunnaki is the general name, Atlantean the name of the civilization they built. His hypothesis is that Atlantis was interplanetary, reaching the Moon and Mars, with the sunken ring city of legend only one capital among many, and he says the tablets put these beings roughly a million years ahead of us technologically.
Gods with a lowercase g
To explain why such beings were worshipped, Carson uses the idea of a cargo cult, in which a less advanced people deifies a more advanced one; humanity today, he says, is "one gigantic eight billion person cargo cult." He separates these beings from the creator of the universe, which he describes as genderless, and notes that the tablets have the gods speaking of answering to a creator of all. Some helped humanity and some tried to destroy it, he says, citing the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Atrahasis epic and the Enuma Elish. Nearly every ancient text, he adds, was written by human scribes taking dictation; the exception he names is the Emerald Tablets, which he believes Thoth wrote himself and which are the subject of his book The Compendium of the Emerald Tablets.
The biblical thread
Carson sees the same theme in the birth of Yeshua, urges viewers to read the apocrypha and the Book of Enoch, which he says the Council of Nicaea left out of the Bible, and links the Anunnaki with the Anakim, beside whom the Israelite scouts felt like grasshoppers (Numbers 13:33).
The Enuma Elish and its discovery
Carson introduces the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic also called the Seven Tablets of Creation, recovered by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, near modern Mosul, and published by George Smith in 1876. It runs to about a thousand lines on seven tablets, and a far more complete copy of Tablet V has recently surfaced at the Sulaymaniyah Museum in Iraq. The library copies date to the 7th century BCE, but Carson argues the story is far older, since tablets were copied from older tablets. He also claims an older version names a planet Nibiru that a later one replaces with Marduk, and that the opening of Genesis, with its separating of the waters and raising of dry land, is copied almost word for word from these tablets.
Sitchin did not invent the story
The dates matter, Carson explains, because critics claim the Anunnaki story is Sitchin's fabrication. He rejects that: "Zecharia Sitchin translated absolutely nothing." Sitchin, he says, cited published translations, pieced the story together and was probably not fully accurate, and this talk rests on scholars who worked long before him.
Marduk
Carson reads that the epic covers "the creation of humankind for the service of the gods," but that its main purpose is to raise Marduk above every other god as chief deity of Babylon. He identifies Marduk with the Egyptian Amun-Ra, calls him a jealous ruler, and argues that Marduk ordered rival gods' faces chipped off statues, the real reason, he says, so many ancient faces are damaged.
The Dogon, the Igigi and Mars
As evidence of contact, Carson cites the Dogon of Mali, who he says knew the order, tilt, colours and orbits of the planets and the structure of the Sirius system, taught to them by the Nommo, beings from Sirius B whom he counts among the Anunnaki. From about 32:15 he turns to the Igigi. In his reading there were two concurrent civilizations, on Earth and on Mars, and the Igigi were the working class: they dug canals, built and mined for hundreds of thousands of years until they felt they had become slaves. He shows Mars images with features he says do not look like rocks, and the Face on Mars at Cydonia. The Igigi's exhaustion is the setup for the creation account itself.
Key takeaways
- Carson's core claim is that the Anunnaki did not create humans from nothing but modified an existing species through genetic manipulation.
- He holds that the Anunnaki and the Atlanteans were the same people, an interplanetary civilization that reached the Moon and Mars.
- He stresses that the Enuma Elish was found in 1849 and published in 1876, long before Sitchin wrote about it.
- He presents the overworked Igigi as the reason humans were made: to take over their labour.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson reads the creation texts as history dictated to human scribes by advanced beings posing as gods. His key move is the line between creating and modifying: these gods, he argues, could not make life from nothing, so they worked on what was already here.
The texts do contain the labour motif. In the Atrahasis epic, the primary source for it, the Igigi dig the rivers and canals for the senior gods until they burn their tools and surround Enlil's house in revolt. Enki (Akkadian Ea) proposes a new being to bear the gods' toil. A god is slain, and the birth goddess, called Mami or Nintu and identified in Mesopotamian tradition with Ninhursag, mixes his flesh and blood with clay; birth goddesses then bring seven men and seven women into the world. Tablet VI of the Enuma Elish retells the idea for Babylon: Marduk announces he will create man, Ea carries out the plan using the blood of Kingu, who led Tiamat's army, and humans take on the work so the gods can rest.
In the ancient-astronaut reading Carson works within, Enki and Ninhursag become the project's scientists, the clay-and-blood mixture becomes a genetic blend of Anunnaki and early hominid, and Sitchin's name for the first engineered human, the Adamu, ties the story to Adam. For the brother gods at the centre of that story, see [Enki and Enlil](/enki-and-enlil-the-two-brothers-of-sumerian-myth); for how the same tradition reads Genesis, see [the Garden of Eden and the Anunnaki](/the-garden-of-eden-and-the-anunnaki-explained-genesis-the-sumerian-edin-and-the-adapa-myth).
What mainstream scholarship says
Assyriologists read the Atrahasis epic and the Enuma Elish as myth: religious literature explaining why humans exist (to serve the gods through temple offerings and labour) and, in the Enuma Elish, why Marduk and Babylon stand at the top of the world. The clay and the slain god's blood say that people are part earth and part divine; they do not describe a laboratory. Sitchin-style genetic-engineering readings rest on translation choices scholars reject: Anunnaki is usually understood as "offspring of An," not "those who from heaven to earth came"; Nibiru appears in Tablet VII of the Enuma Elish as one of Marduk's fifty names, tied to a point in the sky usually linked with Jupiter, not a hidden planet; and no tablet places the Igigi on Mars. The biblical scholar Michael Heiser, among others, documented where Sitchin's glosses depart from standard Sumerian and Akkadian dictionaries.
The supporting claims face counter-evidence too. Walter van Beek's 1991 restudy of the Dogon found no knowledge of Sirius B, and skeptics suggest the details in Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen's original account came from contact with outsiders. Higher-resolution orbiter images show the Face on Mars as an eroded mesa. The Council of Nicaea did not decide the biblical canon, and scholars find shared themes between Genesis 1 and the Enuma Elish, not word-for-word copying. Amun-Ra and Marduk are separate gods of separate cultures, and the defacing of Amun's images was carried out by Akhenaten's own regime. The Hebrew Bible does name Marduk, as Merodach in Jeremiah 50:2, but as a foreign god.
Watch, read and go deeper
Start with Who Were the Anunnaki? for the texts and the ancient-astronaut theory side by side, then [the Sumerian tablets pillar](/the-sumerian-tablets-explained-what-they-are-and-what-they-say) for the sources themselves; Enki and Enlil and the Garden of Eden article follow the creation story into the flood and Genesis. The stream is also on the podcast as Did the Anunnaki Create Humans? By Billy Carson. [The Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki) gathers the rest of Carson's work on the Sumerian gods.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Anunnaki create humans according to the Sumerian texts?
Mesopotamian myths say the gods made humans to take over their labour. The fullest account is the Akkadian Atrahasis epic, in which Enki and the birth goddess shape people from clay mixed with a slain god's flesh and blood; Tablet VI of the Enuma Elish gives a Babylonian version using the blood of Kingu. Billy Carson reads these as genetic modification of an existing species; Assyriologists read them as myth.
What is the Atrahasis epic?
Atrahasis is an Akkadian epic best known from Old Babylonian copies of about the 17th century BCE. It tells how the Igigi gods revolted against their labour, how humans were created to replace them, and how the gods later tried to destroy humanity with plague, drought and a flood. Its hero, warned by Enki, survives in a boat, a story closely related to the flood in Gilgamesh and Genesis.
Who were the Igigi?
In Mesopotamian texts the Igigi are a group of gods, often paired with the Anunnaki. In the Atrahasis epic they are the junior gods who dig the canals until they rebel, which leads to the creation of humans. Billy Carson places them on Mars as the Anunnaki's working class; scholars find no Martian setting in the tablets.
What does the word Anunnaki mean?
Scholars usually translate the Sumerian name as "offspring of An," the sky god, a collective name for the great gods. The popular translation "those who from heaven to earth came" comes from Zecharia Sitchin and is not accepted by Assyriologists. Billy Carson uses the word for any beings who came to Earth from elsewhere.
Sources mentioned
Carson cites the Enuma Elish (the Seven Tablets of Creation) and its newly published Tablet V, the Atrahasis epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Emerald Tablets of Thoth and his own The Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, the Book of Enoch and the apocrypha, Genesis and Numbers 13:33, the work of Austen Henry Layard and George Smith, the books of Zecharia Sitchin and the Dogon traditions of the Nommo. Further reading: W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (1969); Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (1989); W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (2013); George Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis (1876).
