Sitchin and all his "teachings" should be reclassified as some sort of mental disease, it's a bad, easily disproven theory that just wont die.
The Annunaki, how did these guys know the topology of our solar system way before us?
If not the Annunaki then Sumerians
The Sumerians only knew of the motion of the inner planets and the two gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. They knew nothing of outer solar system past
Saturn. Sumerians depicted stars as dots, and the sun as rayed. What you see in this depiction is one star (possibly the sun, center) in association
with a grouping of stars - and not in a literal "map of the heavens" sense, but in a figurative way, the stars being associated with a deity, and
groupings of stars indicating the relationships of a deity to another.
Sumerians didn't depict planets as round dots, they depicted them as crescents. The round dots depict stars.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/06d30caf467d.jpg[/atsimg]
Here's the actual intrepretation of this cylinder seal:
A Brief Analysis of Cylinder Seal VA 243 - from Sitchiniswrong.com
Here is another Sumerian cylinder seal, this one depicts the sun (the rayed star) along with the Pleides constellation (7 dots). As you can see it's
very similar to VA243 in that it's showing Pleides as round dots (possibly representing one deity, in conjunction with a rayed star (representing
another deity, possibly UTU).
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/1bcaf73c51ac.jpg[/atsimg]
Very similar to the one Sitchin has been creatively interpreting as a model of the solar system.
Sitchin went from the cylinder seal depicted above, to a new model for the creation of the solar system, as shown below:
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/19bbfe804273.jpg[/atsimg]
Sitchin based his "Tiamat colliding with Nibiru" solar system theory on this single cylinder seal, and it doesn't even depict the solar system.
Never-mind the fact that this event according to Sitchin occurred
billions of years ago, before the formation of the Earth - what exactly were
these "Annunaki" supposed to be doing all that time? Were they just sitting around 4.5 billion years waiting for monkeys to evolve so they could begin
breeding with them to create humans?
It's a ridiculous theory.
BTW, regarding your opening post, I can only see the Abrahamic religions having been influenced by the Sumerians, even then just barely.
edit
on 13-12-2010 by Blackmarketeer because: (no reason given)