Ancient Aliens — The Sumerian King List and the Antediluvian Dynasties

Ancient Aliens — The Sumerian King List and the Antediluvian Dynasties

Overview

The Sumerian King List is an ancient Mesopotamian document — surviving in multiple cuneiform tablet copies — that records the names and reign lengths of the kings of Sumer from the earliest times through to approximately 1800 BCE. Its most extraordinary feature is the section covering the antediluvian dynasties (the kings before the Great Flood): eight kings whose individual reign lengths range from 18,600 to 43,200 years, for a total pre-Flood reign of approximately 241,200 years.

The Antediluvian Kings

King	City	Reign Length (years)
Alulim	Eridu	28,800
Alalngar	Eridu	36,000
En-men-lu-ana	Bad-tibira	43,200
En-men-gal-ana	Bad-tibira	28,800
Dumuzid the Shepherd	Bad-tibira	36,000
En-sipad-zid-ana	Larak	28,800
En-men-dur-ana	Sippar	21,000
Ubara-Tutu	Shuruppak	18,600

After the Flood, the text notes: "the flood swept over. After the flood had swept over, and the kingship had descended from heaven" — and subsequent kings have dramatically shorter (but still extraordinarily long) reigns, gradually approaching historical lengths.

Ancient Alien Interpretation

Zecharia Sitchin and other ancient alien theorists interpret the antediluvian reign lengths as literal — not symbolic — records of genuinely ancient rulers whose long lifespans reflect either:

• Alien biology: The Anunnaki who served as early kings had lifespans of tens of thousands of years, consistent with their advanced biology
• The sar unit: Sitchin argued that the Sumerian sar (3,600 years) was the unit being used, not the shar (60 years) — making the reigns even more extraordinary
• The text preserves a genuine historical record of the pre-human rulers of Earth — the Anunnaki themselves serving as kings before handing power to human successors

Scholarly Interpretations

Mythological / Literary

Most Sumerologists interpret the antediluvian reign lengths as mythological — a literary device to convey the immense antiquity and divine nature of the earliest kingship. The enormous numbers may reflect:

• The Sumerian sexagesimal (base-60) number system, in which numbers like 28,800 and 36,000 are mathematically elegant
• A deliberate literary contrast between the divine ages of the antediluvian kings and the human-scale reigns of later historical figures
• The document's function as political legitimization rather than historical record

The Parallel with Genesis

The antediluvian king list is structurally similar to the Biblical genealogies of Genesis 5 — the "begats" from Adam to Noah — in which figures like Methuselah live for 969 years and Adam for 930 years. Both traditions place extraordinary longevity in the pre-Flood era and both conclude with a great flood that resets human history. This parallel suggests a shared Mesopotamian literary tradition of antediluvian longevity rather than independent historical records from different sources.

The Historical Kernel

Some scholars propose a middle position: the antediluvian kings may represent dimly remembered historical figures or dynasties whose reigns have been mythologically amplified by the later literary tradition. The cities named — Eridu, Bad-tibira, Sippar, Shuruppak — are all genuine Sumerian cities with archaeological records.

The Flood Division

The division of history into pre-Flood and post-Flood periods in the King List is consistent with a genuine cultural memory of catastrophic flooding in the Mesopotamian lowlands. The Persian Gulf and the Euphrates-Tigris delta have been subject to major flooding events. A sufficiently catastrophic flood event could divide cultural memory into "before" and "after" in exactly the way the King List records.