The Sacred Fifty 

We must return to the treatise ‘The Virgin of the World’. This treatise is quite explicit in saying that Isis and Osiris were sent to help the Earth by giving primitive mankind the arts of civilization:

And Horus thereon said:

‘How was it, mother, then, that Earth received God’s Efflux?’


And Isis said:

‘ ‘Tis they who filled life full of life. ‘Tis they who caused the savagery of mutual slaughtering of men to cease. ‘Tis they who hallowed precincts to the Gods their ancestors and spots for holy rites. ‘Tis they who gave to men laws, food and shelter.’ Etc.




The treatise ends this long section with:





And in the treatise Isis claims that the ‘Black Rite’ honors her and ‘gives perfection’.


It is also concerned with the mysterious thing called ‘Night’ Who weaves her web with rapid light though it be less than Sun’s’. It is made plain that ‘Night’ is not the night sky because it moves in the Heaven along with ‘the other mysteries in turn that move in Heaven, with ordered motions and with periods of times, with certain hidden influences bestowing order on the things below and co-increasing them’. 

We must scrutinize the description of what is labeled ‘Night’ in this treatise. This description makes it perfectly clear that ‘Night’ is not ‘night’, but a code word. For it is said to have ‘light though it be less than Sun’s’. The dark companion of Sirius is a star and has light, though less than the sun. Also ‘Night’ said ‘to weave her web with rapid light’ which specifically describes the object as being in motion.


Since Sirius B orbits Sirius A in fifty years, it moves more rapidly even than three of our sun’s planets in our own solar system – Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus. Of these three, Uranus is the most rapid, and its orbit about the sun takes eighty-four years. So here is a star orbiting more rapidly than a planet! That may indeed be said to constitute ‘weaving a web with rapid light’! 





But to the Sumerians this land, which lay in a direction seemingly other than that of Egypt, had immense importance. consequently, it has tended to monopolize the attention of modern scholars investigating Sumerian geographical references. Kramer thinks that the land Magan’ was probably Egypt and that Sargon even sent his armies there. 

The basic Egyptian astronomy and the basic Sumero-Akkadian astronomy (this assumes a continuity of some sort, as there is no overtly astronomical treatise from the early period of Sumer) are identical. For the multitude of variations at a less basic level, one may consult Professor Otto Neugebauer‘s the Exact Sciences in Antiquity. But Neugebauer’s interests lie with late material, as he admits, and he does less than justice to the earlier material, skimming over it quickly and making little of some things which are important.




Well, at least Professor Neugebauer is honest about his preferences. 

Having nodded in the direction of an authority who has voluntarily abdicated, we proceed. For our evidence we turn to E. A. Speiser‘s translation1 of the Akkadian creation epic know as the Enuma elishfrom the first two words of the text which mean ‘When on high . . . ‘


At the very beginning of this text we read:

He constructed stations for the great gods, 
Fixing their astral likenesses as constellations. 
He determined the year by designating the zones: 
He set up three constellations for each of the twelve months. 
He founded . . ., etc.

In other words, the text gives a system identical with that recorded in the Egyptian star clocks. Twelve months composed of three ten-day weeks each, resulting in thirty-six constellations or ‘decans’ designating astral likenesses of gods.


The text specifically states that there are twelve months consisting of three periods each (unless one strains the point enormously and maintains on no grounds whatsoever that these three periods are unequal, they must be of ten days each – hence ‘ten-day weeks’ as in Egypt), and that a constellation or ‘zone’ of the sky applies to each of these ‘weeks’.


Since three times twelve equals thirty-six, we have thirty-six decans, each of which is ‘designated’ by a constellation. And also as in Egypt, each decan is an ‘astral likeness’ of a great god. It is surprising that no scholar has seen that this passage in the Enuma elish describes the Egyptian star-clock system down to the last detail. 

No doubt also the five ‘epagomenal’ days left over in order to fill out this resulting 360-day year to a 365-day year are referred to in the line: ‘After defining the days of the year of (heavenly) figures,’ which is again identical with the Egyptian tradition where the five left-over days are each assigned to five different gods or heavenly figures and thus defined. In Egypt these five left-over days are called ‘the days upon the year’. These five days are also extremely important in Maya astronomy. But if we get into a discussion of Maya astronomy, we shall be stirring up a hornets’ nest. It is not relevant to the purposes of this book. 

We can see that the astronomical systems in Egypt and Sumer were absolutely identical in their fundamentals. Now these similarities between Egypt and Sumer are a far different matter from similarities of names of gods and religious concepts. One can always maintain that people in different parts of the globe spontaneously produce identical sounds when awe-struck by divine concepts. ‘Everybody around the world says “Ma!” to Mother,’ as we have all heard many times.












But let us return to Sumer and continue in hot pursuit. In Tablet VI of the Enuma elish we find an interesting passage. In it are mentioned the Anunnaki, who were the sons of An (An means ‘heaven’), also known as Anu the great god. These Anunnaki were fifty in number and were called ‘the fifty great gods’. Nearly always these Anunnaki were anonymous, the emphasis being on their number and their greatness and their control over fate.


No certain identification of any important Sumerian god with any one of the Anunnaki exists except peripherally (as I shall describe later). In fact, all Sumerologists have been puzzled by the Anunnaki. They have not been ‘identified’ and no one knows exactly what is meant by them. They recur often throughout the texts, which makes it all the more annoying that nowhere are they explicitly explained. 

But their apparent importance to the Sumerians cannot be questioned. 

In an early Sumerian fragment (from a time long before the civilization of the Babylonians) of the material concerning the epic hero Gilgamesh, entitled ‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living‘, we find an antecedent to the tradition of the Argonauts of the Greeks. This fragment appears in a translation by Kramer.2


In fact, I feel it is safe to say that this Sumerian fragment is the earliest known form of the story of that hero who was later to be named Jason. In the story from this fragment, the hero, Gilgamesh, wishes to go to the ‘land of the living’, which is described as being in the charge of the sun god Utu. In the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the hero, Jason, wishes to search for the golden fleece, which is known to be a solar symbol.


In the Sumerian fragment we also find the surprising line:

‘The hero, his teeth are the teeth of a dragon.’

In the Jason story, the hero, Jason, sows the dragon’s teeth! (So does Cadmus in another Greek tale which we shall examine later.) In the Jason story, Jason is accompanied on his quest by the fifty Argonauts. 


‘Who has a house, to his house! Who has a mother, to his mother! ‘Let single males who would do as I (do), fifty, stand by my side.’ Who had a house, to his house; who had a mother, to his mother, Single males who would do as he (did), fifty, stood at his side. To the house of the smiths he directed his step, The . . . , the . . . -axe, his ‘Might of Heroism’ he caused to be cast there. To the … garden of the plain he [directed] his step, The . . . -tree, the willow, the apple tree, the box tree, the . . . [-tree] he [felled] there. The ‘sons’ of his city who accompanied him [placed them] in their hands.

The fifty companions are mentioned several times. The fragmentary text is extremely broken and confused. Further light on the motif of sowing the dragon’s teeth seems to come from a passage where Gilgamesh, who has for some unknown reason been asleep, was awakened, girded himself, stood like a bull on the ‘great earth’ and:

‘He put (his) mouth to the ground, (his) teeth shook.’

Note that it is at least open to question that the mouth and the teeth are actually his, and the word ‘his’ is both times in parentheses, put thus by the translator.


But here is the entire passage:

my father, ‘May I become as one who sits to be wondered at on the knee of Ninsun, 
my mother who gave birth to me.’



I suspect that the translation needs to be worked on further, but it is difficult, as there are so many words in Sumerian whose meanings are not precisely understood. Whether or not it is Gilgamesh’s own mouth and teeth that are being discussed here, the fact is that Gilgamesh seeks strength by putting some teeth to the ground – either his or someone else’s.



‘The hero, his teeth are the teeth of a dragon’, we may assume that Gilgamesh’s own teeth are probably being referred to – his own teeth which have previously been described as being dragon’s teeth!

Now in the lines following the putting of the teeth to the ground, we learn that Gilgamesh needs to summon strength by putting his teeth to the ground because he needs to fight. In the story of the Argo, Jason sows the dragon’s teeth in the ground, and from them spring up armed soldiers who begin to fight – as is also the case in the story of Cadmus. So we see that in the two Greek myths, as also in this Sumerian fragment, the dragon’s teeth go to the ground and a fight ensues where the hero has acquired superhuman strength.






Furthermore, Diodorus Siculus (IV, 47) and Tacitus (Ann. VI, 34) explain the golden fleece’s origin by saying that Phrixus and Helle (who flew away on the golden ram’s back to Colchis, Helle falling in the Hellespont on the way and giving that body of water its name) really sailed in a ship with a ram’s head on the prow, rather than having ridden the magical ram of the story.



In any case, this boat would definitely have been a boat of Egypt, which to the Sumerians would have been called a ‘Magan-boat’, if we accept what Kramer and others believe, namely, that Magan is Egypt. And the boat was a ‘gift from Hermes’ – in other words from Anubis. No wonder, then, that the Sirius-related fifty is connected with the golden fleece as well as Anubis.





My equating a moment ago of the Argo with an Egyptian celestial barque must now be seen in conjunction with the following passage in which Gilgamesh’s boat is specifically referred to as the ‘Magan-boat’! I might add that the trees which Gilgamesh cut down and which his fifty companions ‘placed in their hands’ according to the text were probably their oars! (The text is too broken for anything at all to be certain, even punctuation, among the fourteen lines which follow that particular passage.)


Here, then, is the passage about the boat:

lor me another will not die, the loaded boat will not sink, The three-ply cloth will not be cut, The ……. will not be overwhelmed, 
House (and) hut, fire will not destroy. 
After it had sunk, after it had sunk, 
After the Magan-boat had sunk, 
After the boat, “the might of Magilum”, had sunk, 
of the womb; 

I must emphasize that there is confusion here, In a footnote Kramer emphasizes that from the line ‘After it had sunk’ it is no longer certain that Gilgamesh is still speaking. It is not clear whether the Magan-boat has really sunk or whether this is a statement injected by Gilgamesh’s ‘faithful servant5 who immediately before the passage just quoted had told Gilgamesh:

‘O my master, journey thou to the “land”, I will journey to the city, 

What seems to happen is that Gilgamesh here tells his frightened servant (who just previously in the text is described as ‘terror-stricken’) that no other will die for him and that ‘the loaded boat will not sink’. Then the servant would seem to break in again in his terror with his hypothetical tale to Gilgamesh’s mother with ‘After it had sunk . . ,’ Then Gilgamesh again speaks, beginning with, ‘Come, let us go forward . ..’ 

The phrase ‘those who come out of the womb’ to describe those who are seated in the Magan-boat may be meant to refer to those who are children of the goddess Nintu (also known as Ninmah, Ninhursag, and Ki – ‘earth’).


This, combined with the strange reference to teeth, seems to refer to the children of the earth-goddess springing from the womb of the earth – for Ki, the earth- goddess (ki means ‘earth’ in Sumerian) is also Nintu or ‘the goddess who gives birth’. (Ninmah means ‘the great goddess’ and Ninhursag means ‘the goddess of the hill, a hursag or hill having been erected by her son – and she was named after it by him in commemoration of a significant mythical event; in Egypt Anubis is also called ‘Anubis of the Hill’, about which I shall have much to say later on, but suffice it here to note that if the Sumerians were to speak of’Anubis of the Hill they would call him Anpu-hursag.) 

Basically in the goddess who gives birth, and also in the earth-goddess, we thus find antecedents to the soldiers springing up from the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth, and also the throwing over his shoulder of the ‘earth’s bones’ (stones) by Deukalion, the Greek Noah, with the stones becoming men much as the teeth did in the other stories. (And teeth are bones!) 

In fact there are several points of contact other than this one between the Deukalion and Jason stories. For the ark of Noah is a concept which is identical with that of the ark of Deukalion, and both are magical ships in which sit ‘those who come out of the womb’, in the sense that they repopulate the world after the deluge. And both arks, but particularly that of Deukalion, are concepts related to the Argo.






But it was from this early source that the Greeks obtained their Deukalion and the Hebrews their Noah – both of which are extremely late forms of an exceedingly ancient story, which existed thousands of years before there were such things as either Greeks or Hebrews in existence. (Anyone really interested in the origins of Greek and Hebrew civilizations should read Professor Cyrus Gordon’s brilliant book The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations3) 

Now the point of going into all this is really to show that the Argonaut motif of fifty heroes in a boat on a heroic quest exists in Sumer and forms a complement to the ‘fifty great gods’. For if the Magan-boat’s fifty heroes are seated, as the Anunnaki usually are, and are ‘those who come forth out of the womb’, and thus children, so to speak, of Nintu, ‘the goddess who gives birth’, then they may be directly equated with the Anunnaki.



The number occurs also in ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Nether World’. There Gilgamesh dons armor which weighs ‘fifty minas’. And in this tale also Gilgamesh has fifty companions. In the later Babylonian version the fifty companions are omitted from the story. At that date the true nature of the symbolism of fifty must have been forgotten. 

In his book The SumeriansKramer points out4 that cultic and symbolic weapons, maces with fifty heads, were fashioned by the ruler Gudea. 

If we return for a moment to the intriguing hursag of the Sumerians, the strange ‘hill’, we must recall that Ninhursag the goddess of the hill is identical with Nintu the goddess who gives birth. Those are two separate names for the same deity. Now it is interesting to note that in Egyptian the word tu means ‘hill’, so that if we take the word nin which means ‘goddess’ and add the Egyptian tu we have ‘the goddess of the hill’, which in fact is a synonym. 

This is by no means the end of this interesting investigation. For if we note that the Egyptian form of Horus (the son of Isis and Osiris) is Heru (which is a bit like Hero, isn’t it?) and the traditional usage in Egyptian is to speak continually of Heru-sa-something which means Horus-the-son-of-something, then we shall note that the strange and puzzling word hursag might really be the Egyptian Heru-sa-Agga, which means ‘Horus the son of Agga9.


It so happens that Agga is an Egyptian synonym for Anubis. And ‘Anubis of the Hill’ has already been mentioned. What is more, the word hursag in its older Sumerian form is indeed hursagga, as may be seen in The Babylonian Genesis, Chapter 2, by Alexander Heidel, ‘A Sumerian Creation Account from Nippur’, where we read of the goddess Ninhursagga. 

It also happens that Agga is in fact a reputable Sumerian name. There is in translation a short 115-line text entitled ‘Gilgamesh and Agga’ from the Sumerian period.5 In line eighty of this text is the mention of a ‘magurru-boat’, which is referred to in much the same way as the Magan-boat in ‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’.


Just as in that previous text the Magan-boat was being discussed as to whether or not it would sink, so in this latter text the ‘magurruboat’ is being discussed as to whether or not it would have its prow cut down.


Curiously, as in the other tale, in this one also the boat is described as having had the worst fate actually occur, for in line ninety-eight we learn that ‘the prow of the magurru-boat was cut down’, just as in the previous text we read:

‘After the Magan-boat had sunk, /After the boat, “the might of Magilum”, had sunk.’

The connections between Egyptian and Sumerian words in sacred contexts become so multifold that it is impossible to ignore the continuities between the two cultures. Let us look, for instance, at the curious phenomenon of the cedar which Gilgamesh is always being claimed to have cut down. In ‘Gilgamesh and the Land of the Living’ Gilgamesh says: ‘I would enter the land of the cutdown cedar’ and later he is described as he ‘who felled the cedar’, etc. That is 

an early Sumerian text. In the actual Epic proper, as we have it, Gilgamesh goes to the Cedar Mountain and slays the monster Humbaba (or Huwawa) in ‘the cedar mountain, the abode of the gods’. In Tablet V we read:

[. . . and] felled [the cedar]. 
[But when Huwawa] heard the noise, 
[He] became angry: ‘Who has [come], 
And has felled the cedar?’

In Chapter XXII of Hamlet’s MillSantillana and von Dechend identify Huwawa with the planet Mercury. Now, remembering that Huwawa is also the god of the cedar forest, it is interesting to note that in Egyptian the word seb means ‘cedar’ and also means ‘the planet Mercury’!



Let us now put aside the enigmatic monster-god Huwawa and turn to the Epic of Gilgamesh for another purpose. But in doing so let us note Kramer’s opinion in his essay ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh and Its Sumerian Sources‘,6 that ‘the poem was current in substantially the form in which we know it, as early as the first half of the second millennium B.C.’

Let us recall that, in an early Sumerian fragment, Gilgamesh’s mother was the goddess Ninsun ‘who is versed in all knowledge’, and upon whose knee he wanted to sit (like Horus on the knee of Isis).






The land of Uruk was standing around [it],

[The land was gathered around it];

[The peop]le pressed to [ward it],

[The men th]ronged around it,

[. . .] while my fellows kissed its feet;


[And thou thyself didst put] it on a par with me.’


‘My mother, last night I felt happy and walked about Among the heroes.

There appeared stars in the heavens.

[The h]ost of heaven fell down toward me.



The land of Uruk was gathered around it, 
While the heroes kissed its feet. 
I put my forehead [firmly] against [it], 
And they assisted me. 
I lifted it up and carried it to thee.’

Kramer translates the two versions somewhat differently.8 One of the most important changes occurs in his translation of what Heidel before him had rendered as ‘the host of heaven’. Kramer renders ‘An’ not as ‘heaven’ but as An (or Anu), the god who was the father of the Anunnaki. And the word which Heidel renders as ‘host’ he comments on in a footnote at considerable length: 

As regards ki-sir, there are too many possible meanings. Furthermore, the one adopted for this passage (‘the ki-sir of Ninurta’ earlier than our passage) should also apply to … the war-god Ninurta, and the sky-god Anu, Enkidu, and something that fell down from heaven. The common assumption that the author may have used in these passages the same term in more than one sense is unsatisfactory. 

In the earlier edition I tried to justify for kisru the rendering ‘liegeman’ for the several passages in question. I now withdraw that suggestion. The correct sense, I believe, is indicated by the use of the term in medical contexts as ‘concentration, essence’, cf. E. Ebeling, JCS, IV (1950), 219. ‘Essence’, or some nuance of this term, could well be applied to deities as well as to missiles from heaven. Our poet had in mind, no doubt, some specific allusion, but the general meaning appears clear enough, Kramer, then, renders ‘the host of heaven’ as ‘the essence of An’, He says:

‘Like the essence of Anu it descends upon me.’

He adds another footnote to comment on the word ‘it’ in this sentence:

‘One of the stars?’

Kramer also changes the last lines in the first version:

‘[I] was drawn to it as though to a woman. 
And I placed it at [thy] feet, 
For thou didst make it vie with me.’ 
The emphasis here on being ‘drawn to it’ may be important. He continues: 

Says to her lord;

[Wise Ninsun], who is versed in all knowledge,

Says to Gilgamesh: ‘Thy rival, – the star of heaven.

Which descended upon thee like [the essence of Anu];



[Thou didst place] it at my feet,


Thou wert drawn to it as though to a woman -‘



All this, which we have examined here in two translations each of two versions, was worth seeing from these several angles. It helps us cover all the possibilities of meaning. It should be obvious that the reference is clearly to a star connected with ‘the essence of Anu’ which ‘draws him towards it’ and is in the area of the (fifty) heroes – and is super-heavy. 

Thus we see that in Sumer both the concepts of the heavy star (later al Wazn) and of the figure ‘fifty’ associated somehow with that star are present. 

In Tablet V of the Enuma elish we read10 about the Anunnaki and something called ‘the Bow Star’ which is their brother and is in the midst of them as they are seated in the celestial regions. This Bow Star is also the daughter of Anu, who raises it up in their midst. (Remember ‘the essence of Anu’.) What is being referred to seems to be Sirius.




Now with particular reference to the three goddesses which Neugebauer claims are versions of Sothis (‘The goddess Satis, who like her companion Anukis is hardly to be taken as a separate constellation but rather as an associate of Sothis’), note the following emphasis on three names for the star, only one of which is ‘Bow Star’:

The fifty great gods took their seats. 
When they beheld the bow, how skilful its shape, 
His fathers praised the work he had wrought. 
As he kissed the bow: ‘This is my daughter!’ 
He mentioned the names of the bow as follows: 
‘Longwood is the first, the second is [. . .]; 
Its third name is Bow-Star, in heaven I have made it shine.’ 

A footnote says of the word ‘its’ in the last line: ‘Referring to the Bow, as indicated by the feminine possessive prefix in line 94.’ (In Egyptian the word Sept, which is the name of the star Sirius, also has the meaning ‘a kind of wood’, though whether this could be ‘longwood’ or not is anyone’s guess.)


We continue:

After Anu had decreed the fate of the Bow, 
And had placed the exalted royal throne before the gods, 
Anu seated it in the Assembly of the gods.

The phrase ‘the Assembly of the gods’ invariably refers to the seated assembly of the fifty Anunnaki. So it is clearly stated, we see, that this ‘Bow Star’ -the daughter of An – was placed by An on the exalted royal throne in the midst of the fifty Anunnaki. In Egypt, Isis as Sothis was also pictured as seated on a white royal throne in the heavens. She too was the daughter of the sky god. Recall also that the hieroglyph for Ast (or Isis) is a throne. And the hieroglyph for her husband Asar (or Osiris) is a throne above an eye. 

Before proceeding, we had better see who ‘the seven gods of destiny’ are. They are often referred to as the seven Anunnaki of the underworld. This, we shall see, also relates to the Sirius question. But the use of Anunnaki in this way underscores the total anonymity of the term ‘Anunnaki’. Needless to say, none of these seven Anunnaki is ever identified as an individual god. They are always ‘the seven’ underworld gods who determine destiny.


The strictly celestial Anunnaki are also known as the Igigi. No Sumerologist has satisfactorily explained all this. It is terribly imprecise and confusing – unless one had a structure to supply which fits under the cloth and matches the contours and can thereby be accepted as a tentative basis of explanation. 


Parker and Neugebauer say12:

‘It is here made clear that Sirius (Sothis) gives the pattern for all the other decanal stars.’







The Egyptians stubbornly clung to the traditional seventy days as the prototype of an underworld experience, despite its inconvenience, and, as we have already seen, ‘Sirius gives the pattern for all the other decanal stars’. In fact, it was the practice through all of Egyptian history for there to be a period of precisely seventy days for the embalming of a human mummy – in imitation of Sirius. Even during the late Ptolemaic period, the embalming process invariably lasted the precise period of seventy days. 


It is worth noting that in the story Etana,14 about the legendary King Etana not long after the Great Flood, who had to ascend to heaven in order to have something done about his inability to have children (and thereby managed to have a son and heir), mentions ‘the divine Seven’ and describes them as Igigi, emphasizing the apparent interchangeability of the terms Igigi and Anunnaki.


Also ‘the great Anunnaki’ are described as ‘They who created the regions, who set up the establishments’. 

In the ‘Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World‘ 15 the Anunnaki are described as being brought forth (they are referred to as if they were stuffed animals being brought out of a closet, dusted off, and displayed in a taxidermists’ contest) and seated on thrones of gold. Once more the throne concept appears. It seems all the Anunnaki ever do is sit and be symbolic. 

Good little Anunnaki, like poodles, sit and smile at Anu. They are never given personalities, poor fellows. I might mention that in this story the nether world is described as having seven gates leading to seven successive rooms (or caves). It is obvious that the period of seventy days during which Sirius was ‘in the underworld’ to the Egyptians led to a breaking down of the seventy days into ten-day weeks, each with a god, giving seven gods.


But these seven gods of the underworld must not have personalities lest there be the distraction of personal qualities to detract from the purely numerical significance of the concept. And of course the seven rooms of the seven gods are successive, leading from ‘week’ to ‘week’ until Sirius again rises. So we see yet another essential link between the early Sumerian concepts and the Egyptian concepts.





‘The black-headed people’, which is how the Sumerians usually referred to themselves in their writings (when the context is sufficiently pious they meekly call themselves ‘the beclouded’; it is also interesting to note that the Egyptians were known as ‘the melampodes’ or ‘the black-footed people’ to the Greeks!) obviously didn’t take to the rise of Marduk with unanimous acclaim. In many ways the Enuma elish is a blatant propaganda tract for Marduk, alternately trying to convert and to denounce the people.


Here we see the author trying to woo them:16

Let his sovereignty be surpassing having no rival. 
May he shepherd the black-headed ones, his creatures. 
Without fail let them support their gods! 
Their lands let them improve, build their shrines, 
Let the black-headed people wait on their gods. 
In other words, the author despairs and goes into a sulk. For his next words indicate the sentiment, ‘We don’t need them, we’ll go it alone’: 
Let us then proclaim his fifty names!


As Marukka, Marduk ‘gladdens the heart of the Anunnaki, appeases their [spirits]’. All the fifty names are given, along with short comments following each. In a footnote Speiser says, revealingly, that:


The list ends and we read in the text:

With the title ‘Fifty’ the great gods 
Proclaimed him whose names are fifty and made his way supreme.

This final note adds a last flourish of emphasis to the importance to the supreme god of the title ‘Fifty’ as well as the designation by fifty names. 



I suspect these names of being related to the Egyptian Asar (Osiris). We have already seen how the An of Egypt was known in Sumer not only as An but as Anu, picking up a ‘u’ ending. It is therefore not so senseless to see in Asaru a Sumerian form of Asar, with the same ‘u’ ending added. But the Egyptians themselves also had an Asaru, or more precisely, an Asar-uu, whom Wallis Budge describes as ‘a form of Osiris worshipped in lower Egypt’. 

Since Asaru in Sumer corresponds to Asar-uu in Egypt, what about the Sumerian Asaruludu? In Egyptian a vegetative Osiris would be known as Asar-rutu but as is well known, the liquid V and ‘1’ are in Egyptian entirely interchangeable and represented by the same hieroglyph.


So Asar-rutu could just as well be Asar-lutu, and the lingual ‘t’ as opposed to a dental ‘t’ is pronounced rather like a ‘d’, being a softer sound. If we merely transliterate it thus, we have Asar-ludu. It would mean, ‘Osiris of the growing plants’.



‘bestower of cultivation . . . creator of grain and herbs, who causes vegetation to sprout’.

Immediately after one of the Asaru-names of Marduk in the Enuma elish we find that his thirteenth name is Tutu. It so happens that Tutu is the name of an Egyptian god. Wallis Budge describes him as ‘a lion-god, son of Neith’. (Wallis Budge says that Neith was: ‘One of the oldest goddesses of Egypt. She was the goddess of hunting and weaving, but was identified with many other goddesses such as Isis, Meh-urt, and their attributes were assigned to her.’17)





It is important to look even closer at the Egyptian god Tutu. In Heidel’s translation of the Enuma elish he gives for Asaruludu the early Sumerian epithet namshub as opposed to the late Babylonian form namru – both meaning ‘bright’, and in the text further explained as, ‘The bright god who brightens our way’.’


In a footnote Heidel explains:

‘The poets are here apparently playing on the Sumerian term shuba, which is equated with the Babylonian words ebbu, ellu, and namru, all of which mean “bright”.5

Now, what is so interesting is that in Egyptian the word shu means ‘bright’ and also describes the sun god – who is indeed a ‘bright god who brightens our way’. So we see that shu in Egyptian means the same as shuba in Sumerian. Furthermore, both are made to apply to a description of the sun. Also the Sumerian shuba is made to refer to Asarluhi, and we may now take note of the further surprising fact that the Egyptian god’ Tutu is, according to Wallis Budge:

‘a form of the god Shu, whose symbol was a lion walking’.19





‘The Black Rite’ concerned something called ‘Night’ which was apparently an object that moves in heaven along with ‘the other mysteries in turn that move in heaven, with ordered motions and periods of times’. It has less light than the sun and it ‘weaves a web with rapid light’. 


‘Night’ may thus refer to Sirius B, just as may ‘black Osiris‘ and ‘invisible Nephthys‘. 


In Egypt and Sumer (Babylonia) there were identical systems of dividing the calendar year into twelve months each composed of three weeks which lasted ten days apiece. Each week had a constellation of the night sky associated with it (which in modern parlance we might describe as ‘being a kind of zodiac’). Thirty-six of these weeks added up only to 360 days, which was less than a year, so the 365-day year was obtained by adding on five extra days at the end. 


In Sumer the ‘fifty great gods’ called the Anunnaki were anonymous as individuals and only ever spoken of as ‘the fifty great gods’ with the emphasis on their number. They were literally restricted to the level of being a numerological cipher. They are continually invoked and are of importance – but they never did anything but sit on their thrones and ‘be fifty’. 

In an early Sumerian tale of their epic hero Gilgamesh, we find him accompanied in his adventures by fifty heroes, reminiscent of the fifty Argonauts who accompanied Jason. ‘His teeth are the teeth of a dragon’, we are told – reminiscent of Jason sowing the dragon’s teeth. And Gilgamesh also puts his teeth to the ground (that much we can gather, but the passage is obscure and he may really be sowing teeth).



Gilgamesh somehow derives strength from putting his teeth to the ground. In the Greek tale, Jason sows the teeth and they spring up as strong soldiers – another parallel. 


In the early Gilgamesh tale of the Sumerians, Gilgamesh and his fifty proto-Argonauts have some connection with a ship (the text is tantalizingly fragmented) called ‘the Magan-boat’. It should be remembered that Magan is the Sumerian name for Egypt. 

Hence the boat is connected with Egypt. 

All the Greek Argonauts were related to one another and more or less anonymous as individuals – reminiscent of the earlier Sumerian ‘fifty heroes’ accompanying Gilgamesh and also the ‘fifty great gods’ known as Anunnaki. 



The ‘fifty great gods’ of Sumer, the Anunnaki, are invariably seated. Sacred oarsmen or Argonauts are all, of course, invariably seated while they are rowing. ‘The fifty who sit’ and ‘the fifty who sit and row’ seem to be a motif. 

The other element besides the eye in the Osiris-name hieroglyph is the throne, which is the hieroglyph for Isis as well. The throne is a divine seat. The Sumerians frequently intoned of the Anunnaki that they were ‘they who are seated on their thrones’; or sometimes for a bit more drama, ‘the fifty great gods took their seats’. (Of course they did nothing even then.) 

The Egyptian Anubis (Anpu) was a god ‘of the hill’. The Sumerian god Anu’s wife was a goddess ‘of the hill’. 

The older form of the Sumerian word for hill, hursagga, may be derived from the Egyptian Heru-sa-agga, where ‘agga’ refers to Anubis (who was ‘of the hill’). There are many other word and name similarities between Egypt and Sumer. 

In the Epic of Gilgamesh a dream of Gilgamesh is described where he encounters a heavy star that cannot be lifted despite immense effort. This star descends from heaven to him and is described as connected with Anu (who is the god of heaven). Thus we find ‘the heavy star’ concept in Babylonia long before the Arabs even existed and were to have their star in the Great Dog (and the other in Argo) called ‘Weight’ and described as ‘the heavy star’. 

Gilgamesh is drawn to this heavy star irresistibly, in a manner described in a way that seems to hint at a kind of gravitational attraction (to those, that is, who are conscious of a ‘heavy star’ like Sirius B being gravitationally powerful as well as ‘heavy’). 

The Epic of Gilgamesh refers to ‘the essence of Anu’ possessed by the star. The word rendered as ‘essence’ is used elsewhere in medical contexts referring to ‘concentration, essence’ – an intimation of super-dense matter? This ‘concentrated star essence of Anu’ was too heavy for Gilgamesh to lift in his dream. 




  3. A description of the star as being composed of a ‘concentrated essence’ and of having extreme powers of attraction described in a manner reminiscent of gravitational attraction.

These elements comprise almost a complete description of Sirius B: a super-heavy gravitationally powerful star made of concentrated super-dense matter (‘essence’) with the number fifty associated with it (describing its period?) – and connected with An (Anu), which we know to be linked in Egypt (and Gilgamesh’s ‘Magan-boat’ seems Egyptian) with Sirius.


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  1. In Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts.

  2. Also in Pritchard, ibid.



  5. Also in Pritchard, op. cit.



  8. Pritchard, op. cit.

  9. Ibid.


  11. de Santillana, Giorgio, and von Dechend, Hertha, Hamlet’s Mill, Macmillan & Company Ltd; London, 1969.


  13. Ibid., p. 73.


  15. Ibid. p. 106.

  16. In Pritchard, ibid.







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