The Anunnaki are a group of deities of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, ᴀssyrians and Babylonians. In the earliest Sumerian writings about them, which come from the Post-Akkadian period, the Anunnaki are deities in the pantheon, descendants of An (the god of the heavens) and Ki (the goddess of earth), and their primary function was to decree the fates of humanity.
The name Anunnaki is derived from An, the Sumerian god of the sky. The name is variously written “da-nuna”, “da-nuna-ke4-ne”, or “da-nun-na”, meaning “princely offspring” or “offspring of An”.
The Anunnaki were believed to be the offspring of An and the earth goddess Ki. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag, stating that they were originally the same figure.The oldest of the Anunnaki was Enlil, the god of air and chief god of the Sumerian pantheon. The Sumerians believed that, until Enlil was born, heaven and earth were inseparable.Then, Enlil split heaven and earth in two and carried away the earth while his father An carried away the sky.
The Anunnaki are chiefly mentioned in literary texts and very little evidence to support the existence of any cult of them has yet been unearthed. This is likely because each member of the Anunnaki had his or her own individual cult, separate from the others.Similarly, no representations of the Anunnaki as a complete group have yet been discovered, although a few depictions of two or three individual members together have been identified. Deities in ancient Mesopotamia were almost exclusively anthropomorphic. They were thought to possess extraordinary powers and were often envisioned as being of tremendous physical size.The deities typically wore melam, an ambiguous substance which “covered them in terrifying splendor”.Melam could also be worn by heroes, kings, giants, and even demons.The effect that seeing a deity’s melam has on a human is described as ni, a word for the physical tingling of the flesh.Deities were almost always depicted wearing horned caps, consisting of up to seven superimposed pairs of ox-horns. They were also sometimes depicted wearing clothes with elaborate decorative gold and silver ornaments sewn into them.
The ancient Mesopotamians believed that their deities lived in Heaven, after an earlier history of visiting earth in the mythological texts, and that a god’s statue was a physical embodiment of the god himself. As such, cult statues were given constant care and attention and a set of priests was ᴀssigned to tend to them. These priests would clothe the statues and place feasts before them so they could “eat”. A deity’s temple was believed to be that deity’s literal place of residence.[23] The gods had boats, full-sized barges which were normally stored inside their temples and were used to transport their cult statues along waterways during various religious festivals. The gods also had chariots, which were used for transporting their cult statues by land. Sometimes a deity’s cult statue would be transported to the location of a battle so that the deity could watch the battle unfold. The major deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon, which included the Anunnaki, were believed to participate in the “ᴀssembly of the gods”, through which the gods made all of their decisions. This ᴀssembly was seen as a divine counterpart to the semi-democratic legislative system that existed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BC – c. 2004 BC).
The earliest known usages of the term Anunnaki come from inscriptions written during the reign of Gudea (c. 2144–2124 BC) and the Third Dynasty of Ur. In the earliest texts, the term is applied to the most powerful and important deities in the Sumerian pantheon: the descendants of the sky-god An.This group of deities probably included the “seven gods who decree”: An, Enlil, Enki, Ninhursag, Nanna, Utu, and Inanna.
Although certain deities are described as members of the Anunnaki, no complete list of the names of all the Anunnaki has survived and they are usually only referred to as a cohesive group in literary texts. Furthermore, Sumerian texts describe the Anunnaki inconsistently and do not agree on how many Anunnaki there were, or what their divine function was. Originally, the Anunnaki appear to have been heavenly deities with immense powers. In the poem Enki and the World Order, the Anunnaki “do homage” to Enki, sing hymns of praise in his honor, and “take up their dwellings” among the people of Sumer. The same composition twice states that the Anunnaki “decree the fates of mankind”.
Virtually every major deity in the Sumerian pantheon was regarded as the patron of a specific city and was expected to protect that city’s interests. The deity was believed to permanently reside within that city’s temple. One text mentions as many as fifty Anunnaki ᴀssociated with the city of Eridu. In Inanna’s Descent into the Netherworld, there are only seven Anunnaki, who reside within the Underworld and serve as judges. Inanna stands trial before them for her attempt to take over the Underworld; they deem her guilty of hubris and condemn her to death.
Major deities in Sumerian mythology were ᴀssociated with specific celestial bodies. Inanna was believed to be the planet Venus. Utu was believed to be the sun. Nanna was the moon. An was identified with all the stars of the equatorial sky, Enlil with those of the northern sky, and Enki with those of the southern sky. The path of Enlil’s celestial orbit was a continuous, symmetrical circle around the north celestial pole, but those of An and Enki were believed to intersect at various points.
