In 1893, a team from the University of Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet slightly larger than a man’s hand from the excavation trenches at Nippur. It was cataloged as CBS 10673, packed into a crate with several hundred other fragments, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it sat in the basement of the Penn Museum for over 60 years, classified as a cosmogonic [music] fragment, Old Babylonian copy, partial text.
The first partial translation was attempted in 1956 by Samuel Noah Kramer, the same Kramer who spent decades assembling Sumerian myths from shattered pieces scattered across 20 museums worldwide. He translated the upper third, assigned it to the category of creation narratives, and moved on to better preserved material that he considered more urgent.
The lower two-thirds of CBS 10673, covered in dense cuneiform script arranged in two tight columns with unusually small sign spacing, remained untranslated until 2004. [music] No one prioritized it. No one had reason to. When a team at the Oriental Institute in Chicago finally worked through the full text, what they found did not match Kramer’s classification.
The tablet does not describe the creation of humanity. It describes what existed before humanity. Five distinct species, each named with its own Sumerian compound term, each given a physical description, a function, and a duration of existence. And for each of the five, the tablet provides a specific mechanism of destruction.
Not a single flood. Not generic divine wrath. Five separate extinction events described with structural detail that appears nowhere else in the surviving cuneiform corpus. The tablet has been on restricted access since 2011. The stated reason is conservation. The conservation work has not produced a single published status report in 14 years.
If you are here because the artifacts, the restricted tablets, the parts of the archaeological record that do not fit the textbook version of history interest you, subscribe. We investigate one of these cases every week. Now, let me show you what the tablet actually says about the five species that came before us.
The tablet opens with a period the Sumerians called Namlú Gala, a phrase Kramer rendered as the age of lordship. The 2014 proposed an alternative. Namlú Gala functions not as a description of governance, but as a temporal marker. An era defined not by who ruled, but by what lived. The first species is called Uuldu, which breaks down into Uul, meaning primordial, and Du, meaning to shape.
The Uuldu are described as beings of the water and the stone, who moved without legs and built without hands. Their size is given in Sumerian architectural units, suggesting organisms between 3 and 5 m in length. Their function is stated plainly. They prepared the ground. The mechanism of their ending reads, “The sky burned and the waters turned to powder.
” A 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented chemical signatures at the Permian-Triassic boundary, 252 million years ago, the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. The signatures indicated extreme atmospheric heating and ocean acidification so severe that marine carbonate structures dissolved.
The waters turned to powder is not poetic metaphor. It is what happens to a calcium carbonate ocean under catastrophic acidification. The second species, Guneurgal, translates as great boned form. They walked on the land the Uuldu had prepared, consumed vegetation, and their bones were as the pillars of a temple.
Their ending came through the fire from the outer darkness, a grammatical construction the Sumerians reserved specifically for events originating beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, 66 million years ago, a bolide impact, fire from the outer darkness, and the species it destroyed, great-boned vegetation consumers whose skeletons were as temple pillars, bear a resemblance to sauropod dinosaurs that is difficult to attribute to coincidence.
Two species, two extinctions, both described by people who had never seen a fossil. The remaining three entries maintain the same pattern, and the fifth one is the most disturbing of all. The third species is designated Ashmegar, a compound that has generated more disagreement than any other term on the tablet.
Ash means singular. Me refers to the divine laws governing reality. Gar means to place. Together, the ones who set the singular law. They are described as small, numerous, dwelling in structures built from the Earth itself, operating as a collective rather than as individuals. The scribe uses a phrase with no parallel in any other Sumerian text.
They thought with one body. Individual cognition expressed through collective behavior. But the significant element is their destruction. The breath of the world changed, and the Ashmegar could not change with it. Their structures endured, but the builders did not. Paleontologists studying the late Carboniferous period have documented exactly this.
Atmospheric oxygen levels reached 35% supporting arthropods of extraordinary size. Dragonflies with 70-cm wingspans, millipedes over 2-m long, scorpions the size of dogs. These organisms built extensive burrow networks across multiple continents. When oxygen levels crashed during the transition to the Permian, their passive tracheal respiratory systems could not function.
The breath of the world changed. Their trace fossils survived. The builders did not. A Sumerian scribe writing around 1800 BCE described an extinction mechanism that modern paleontology would not formally document until Robert Burner’s atmospheric oxygen models at Yale in the 1990s. The scribe did not have isotope analysis or sediment cores.
He had a tradition that told him a species had once breathed differently and died when the air betrayed them. The question is not whether this correspondence is real. The question is where the tradition came from. The fourth entry introduces Lunita Kur, a compound that translates as the near humans of the other land.
The physical description is the most detailed on the tablet. The Lunita Kur walked upright, used stone tools, wore animal skins, and made sounds that carried meaning, but were not speech. They were stronger than humans with thicker bones and skulls that sloped where ours are flat. They lived in caves. They buried their dead.
And they existed alongside the earliest humans for many counted seasons before they disappeared. Their ending has no catastrophe. The tablet says simply that the new ones came and the Lunita Kur grew fewer and fewer until the last of them slept and did not wake. In 2010, Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute published the first Neanderthal genome.
Neanderthals coexisted with modern humans for approximately 5,000 years. They used tools, wore skins, buried their dead with apparent ritual intent. Their bones were denser. Their skulls featured pronounced brow ridges and a sloping posterior cranium. They communicated using a vocal apparatus that lacked the descended larynx, enabling full human speech.
They made sounds that carried meaning but were not speech. Their populations declined gradually as modern humans expanded into their territories. The last known group survived in southern Iberia until approximately 40,000 years ago. They grew fewer and fewer until the last of them slept and did not wake. The Sumerians emerged around 4,500 BCE.
The Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago. A gap of 35,000 years. No oral tradition survives that span without written records. And yet CBS 10,673 describes a species matching Neanderthals in every particular the tablet addresses. >> [music] >> Anatomy, behavior, tools, communication, and the exact demographic pattern of their decline.
Either the scribe invented a description that aligns perfectly with a hominin species he could not have known about or the information came from a source that preserved knowledge across a time span that should have erased it completely. The fifth entry is the shortest and the most [music] difficult.
The species is designated Anshaga, those of the inner heaven. The physical description is almost absent. Instead, the text describes capabilities. The Anshaga knew the counting of all things. They built structures that moved the stars in their vision. They spoke across distances without sound.
And they held the Me, the divine laws, not as gifts from the gods but as possessions earned through their own understanding. This is the only species on the tablet described as possessing technology. Not tools, technology. And the mechanism of their destruction is not environmental. >> [music] >> The text says the Anunnaki reached for the fire of the gods and the fire consumed them.
They burned from within and the land they stood on became glass and the water they drank became poison and their children were born twisted for seven generations until none were born at all. The 2004 translation team published this passage with a footnote [music] that has been cited more than any other element of their work.
The footnote reads, “The description is consistent in its structural elements with the known effects of ionizing radiation exposure on biological populations, >> [music] >> including acute radiation syndrome, environmental vitrification, water table contamination, and multi-generational teratogenic effects leading to reproductive failure.
” In 2005, a geological survey in Rajasthan documented deposits of fused silica glass in strata dating to approximately 2000 BCE. The chemical composition did not match meteorite impact signatures. The trace element ratios were closer to trinitite, the glass created at the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, than to any natural formation.
The Anunnaki are the species on CBS 10673 that most closely resembles humanity. Technological, mathematical, ambitious, destroyed not by an external force but by their own achievement. The tablet does not say whether we are the same species returning or a new attempt. It simply records what happened to the last civilization [music] that reached the level we are approaching now.
Five species, five extinctions. Each described in language that maps onto a real event in Earth’s biological history. The correspondences are structurally specific. Marine organisms destroyed by ocean acidification. Large terrestrial fauna destroyed by bolide impact. Giant arthropods destroyed by atmospheric oxygen collapse.
Near humans gradually replaced by modern humans. A technological civilization destroyed by its own fire. The order on the tablet does not follow strict chronological sequence. The oxygen crash preceded the Permian-Triassic event, but the tablet lists them in reverse. This has been used as an argument against the correspondence.
But independent researcher Daniela Morisini, in a 2019 paper accepted for conference presentation at the European Association of Archaeologists, and then withdrawn before delivery under unexplained circumstances, argued that the tablet is organized not chronologically, but hierarchically. Each species is more complex than the last.
Water creatures, land creatures, collective builders, near humans, technological civilization, a ladder of increasing sophistication, each rung destroyed by a different mechanism, building toward one implicit question the tablet never explicitly asks, but that its entire structure makes unavoidable. If every species before us was destroyed, what destroys us? The fifth entry answers it.
The fire of the gods is not punishment. It is not judgment. It is a threshold. A technological milestone that every sufficiently advanced species eventually reaches, and that, according to the record preserved on this single clay tablet in a Philadelphia basement, none has survived. The scribe at Nippur did not editorialize. He did not warn.
He simply documented what his tradition told him had happened five times before, and arranged it in the only order that mattered, the order of what each species was capable of when it died. CBS 10673 was placed on restricted access in 2011, 7 months after the full 2004 translation was first cited in a popular science publication, a New Scientist article that drew attention to the extinction correspondences and generated significant public interest.
The stated reason is conservation, but several details resist routine explanation. Conservation restrictions typically limit physical handling while maintaining catalog visibility. CBS 10673 was removed from the museum’s searchable electronic catalog in the same 2018 update that removed CBS 8534, the chromosome tablet held in the same institution.
The accession number exists in the original 1893 printed ledgers, but the digital record has been thinned. 14 years is an extraordinarily long hold for a tablet of this size. The Penn Museum has conserved tablets in worse condition within 2 to 3 years. >> [music] >> No status report has been issued. Formal access requests from three independent researchers between 2015 and 2023 were declined using identical language.
The same sentences, same phrasing, same institutional template applied to two tablets that happen to contain the two most anomalous texts in the museum’s Nippur collection. A junior member of the 2004 translation team, speaking off the record in 2018, said only that the institutional response to the tablet’s public visibility had been chilling and that further work on the text was unlikely to receive university support.
These are not the words of people who believed they translated a routine creation myth. The team leader has not published on Sumerian cosmogonic material since 2011. His academic output shifted entirely to administrative texts and economic records, the least controversial category of cuneiform scholarship. The pivot was never publicly explained.
CBS 10673 does not answer its own question. It describes five species, five destructions, five clearings of the biological stage, each making way for something more complex, more capable, more dangerous. It places humanity at the end of this sequence, not as the pinnacle of creation, but as the latest iteration in a cycle that has repeated five times before.
And it gives the fifth destruction a cause that is not geological, not astronomical, not atmospheric. It is technological, self-inflicted. The Anunnaki, the heart of sky beings, had mathematical knowledge, long-distance communication, structures that altered their perception of the cosmos. If they existed and destroyed themselves at the threshold described on the tablet, then we are not pioneers.
We are followers on a path that has been walked before, approaching a fire that has burned before. The geological evidence is thin, fused glass in Rajasthan and Libya. Anomalous signatures in strata that do not match known natural sources. None of it conclusive, all of it contested. But the tablet’s description is on the clay.
It has been read. It says what it says. And it sits in a museum basement in Philadelphia, restricted, uncataloged in the digital record, waiting for someone to ask why a 3, 800-year-old scribe described five mass extinctions with structural accuracy a modern paleontologist would recognize. And why the institution holding this record has spent 14 years making it harder to see.
The Sumerians did not have carbon dating or genome sequencing or atmospheric modeling. They had clay and reeds and a tradition they said came from beings older than themselves. What they wrote on CBS 10673 either represents the most extraordinary coincidence in ancient literature or the most extraordinary inheritance.
The tablet does not tell us which. It records what came before and how each version ended. And it leaves the sixth ending, ours, unwritten. If this changed how you think about what the Sumerians actually knew, subscribe. Next week, we are looking at another tablet from the same Nippur collection. One that describes not what lived before humans, but what was done to human biology after we were created.
The video on screen goes deeper into the restricted material at the Penn Museum. Click it. The archive is larger than they want you to know.
