The Enuma Elish, Tiamat, and the Sitchin Nibiru Controversy

On clay tablets compiled around 1000 BCE and known as MUL.APIN, Babylonian astronomers listed a celestial body they called Nibiru—and most often identified it with Jupiter. In the Enuma Elish, the same civilization staged a stranger drama: Tiamat, the primordial goddess of salt water; her consort Apsu, who first plotted against the younger gods because their noise disturbed his rest; and Marduk, who volunteered to dispatch her with arrows, winds, and a net, then split her body in two to make the sky, the earth, and the rivers. [1] [5]

What the Enuma Elish and Tiamat Actually Describe

The Enuma Elish opens not with a planet but with water — specifically, two primordial waters named Apsu and Tiamat, whose commingling produced the first generation of younger gods. Tiamat is the goddess of salt water, paired with the freshwater god Apsu; her name derives from the Akkadian tiamtum, simply meaning “sea”. She is described consistently across translations as a primordial mother figure of chaos, not as a destroyed planet or any celestial body. The surviving seven clay tablets, totaling roughly 1,000 lines in Akkadian, were recovered in fragmentary form by Austen Henry Layard in 1849 from the Library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh and first published by George Smith in 1876. The earliest attestation of Tiamat as a divine entity actually predates the Enuma Elish: an Old Akkadian incantation, after which she is rarely attested until the first millennium BCE. [1] [4] [27]

In Tablet I, after Ea kills Apsu, Tiamat creates exactly eleven composite monsters — named in the surviving cuneiform as Bašmu, Ušumgallu, Mušmaḫḫū, Mušḫuššu, Laḫmu, Ugallu, Uridimmu, Girtablullû, Umū dabrūtu, Kulullû, and Kusarikku, creatures with poison for blood instead of blood — and installs her new consort Kingu as their commander, giving him the Tablet of Destinies. Marduk volunteers to fight Tiamat only on the condition the gods proclaim him supreme ruler; after trapping her with a net and the four winds and shooting an arrow that pierces her heart, he splits her body in two “like a dried fish”. The upper half becomes the heavens; the lower half becomes the earth. The Tigris and Euphrates flow from her eyes, mountains form from her udder, her ribs become gates — a cosmogonic dissection of a slain goddess, not a planetary collision. On Marduk’s plan, Ea then creates humanity from the blood of the slain Kingu, to relieve the gods of their labour. The poem ends with a litany of fifty names bestowed upon Marduk by the assembled gods, sealing his elevation. [2] [3] [13]

The “Anunnaki” of the Enuma Elish are not visitors from another world. They are a class of great gods within the Mesopotamian pantheon — the Sumerian Anuna, a name possibly meaning “princely offspring” or “seed of princes”; in myth they are the descendants of the sky god An and the earth goddess Ki. In Tablet I, when Tiamat elevates Kingu, she declares “Let your commands prevail over all the Anunnaki” — referring to the great gods of the assembly, not alien astronauts. The text’s primary function is theogonic: it legitimizes Marduk’s rise to kingship over the Babylonian pantheon, positioning him as son of Ea/Enki. This political-theological purpose is confirmed by the late Assyrian recensions, which simply substitute the national god Ashur for Marduk as the champion. A ritual text from the Seleucid period states that the poem was recited during the Akitu (Babylonian New Year) festival, though scholars debate whether that reading took place at all. Mainstream Assyriology reads the Enuma Elish within the standard Chaoskampf combat-myth pattern attested across Sumerian, Babylonian, Ugaritic, Hurro-Hittite, Egyptian, and Israelite literature — a young storm/cosmic-order god defeating a primordial sea monster to establish ordered creation, not as encoded astronomy or an ancient-astronaut narrative. [4] [13] [21]

The Enuma Elish contains no reference to a destroyed planet, a 12th planet, or any extraterrestrial body. Tiamat is consistently a primordial salt-water goddess throughout. The term “Nibiru” appears in the text in Tablet V, where Marduk fixes the station of Nibiru in the sky alongside those of Enlil and Ea, and in Tablet VII (lines 124–131), where it is one of Marduk’s fifty names and designates Marduk’s star tasked with fixing celestial stations and shepherding the planetary paths — not a destroyed world, not a 12th member of the solar system, and not an extraterrestrial homeworld. In Babylonian astronomical compendia like MUL.APIN (ca. 1000 BCE), Nibiru is identified primarily with the planet Jupiter (Marduk’s star) and occasionally Mercury; the Akkadian term derives from ebēru, “to cross over,” referring to a celestial crossing-point. The alternative reading — Zecharia Sitchin’s claim, articulated in The 12th Planet (1976), that Tiamat was a planet between Mars and Jupiter destroyed by a collision with Nibiru, and that the Anunnaki were alien genetic engineers who crossed their DNA with Homo erectus to create humans — is explicitly characterized in mainstream scholarship as pseudoscience and pseudohistory, with documented errors in his translations of terms like “Anunnaki” (mainstream: possibly “princely offspring”; Sitchin: “those who from heaven came to earth”) and “shem” (mainstream: “name”; Sitchin: “rocket”). The most striking finding is therefore the gap between what the cuneiform actually contains — a 1,000-line political hymn to Marduk composed in the second millennium BCE, recovered in 1849, and read consistently as theogonic literature for over 150 years — and the planetary-collision framework that has been projected onto it since 1976. [5] [6] [8] [15]

Sitchin’s Planetary Reading of the Creation Epic

The Enuma Elish opens Tablet I with a genealogical scene that has generated two fundamentally incompatible readings. In the standard Akkadian, Apsu and Tiamat are primordial cosmic waters — Apsu the freshwater father, Tiamat the saltwater mother — whose commingled waters produce Lahmu, Lahamu, Anshar, Kishar, Anu, and Nudimmud (Ea) in sequence. Tiamat, after her consort Apsu is killed by Ea, creates eleven kinds of monsters and elevates her son Kingu as champion; Marduk then defeats her in combat and splits her body to form the sky and earth, with the Tigris and Euphrates flowing from her eyes. The narrative is a theogonic battle culminating in cosmogonic construction — not an astronomical event. [2] [7] [13]

Zecharia Sitchin, publishing The 12th Planet, recast the drama as a physical collision between bodies in space. On his reading Tiamat was a planet lying between Mars and Jupiter, struck by one of the satellites of Nibiru, which he counted as the twelfth member of the solar system alongside the nine then-known planets, the Sun and the Moon. In this reading, one of Nibiru’s satellites strikes Tiamat, and the collision formed the planet Earth, the asteroid belt and the Moon. Sitchin assigned Nibiru a highly elliptical 3,630-year orbit. [8] [17]

In the prologue to The 12th Planet, Sitchin presents the Enuma Elish as a literal account of what the Sumerians believed, a hermeneutic stance that places his work outside the conventional Assyriological framing of the text as Babylonian theological-political literature glorifying Marduk’s supremacy. Sitchin’s academic credentials for the work he claimed to do are disputed or absent — his university training was in economic history (London School of Economics) and he worked as a journalist and editor in Israel, not as a trained Assyriologist; no verified degree-level credential in Sumerian or Akkadian has been produced. The critics who have documented the philological problems include Michael S. Heiser, who holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages. [9] [15] [17]

Nibiru, in actual Babylonian astronomical texts — most prominently the MUL.APIN compendium — refers to a celestial body associated with the god Marduk, most commonly identified with Jupiter, occasionally with Mercury, or to a “crossing point” / “ferry point” of celestial orbits. The term is connected to the concept of crossing or ferrying, and in scholarly readings it denotes a celestial ‘crossing point’ / ‘ferry point’ of orbits. No cuneiform attestation places Nibiru as a trans-Plutonian 12th planet on a 3,600-year orbit. The Anunnaki, in the same textual record, are a group of deities descended from An (sky) and Ki (earth), functioning as judges of the dead or members of the great divine assembly; nothing in the cuneiform corpus suggests an extraterrestrial origin, habitation of a planet called Nibiru, or involvement in human genetic engineering. [5] [21] [28]

Sitchin’s principal inscriptional evidence is cylinder seal VA 243, which he reads as a depiction of the solar system’s twelve bodies. This interpretation is described as incorrect by mainstream Assyriologists and ancient-language specialists. [17] [18]

Nibiru in Babylonian Astronomical Texts

The word “Nibiru” entered cuneiform studies carrying baggage it never earned. The term is Akkadian, derived from the verb ebēru meaning “to cross over” or “to ferry,” and translates literally as “crossing,” “ford,” “ferry,” or “point of transition”. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary documents attestations of neberu in mundane contexts, including geographical river crossings, ferry fees, and place names. In Babylonian usage, Nibiru could simply mean a river crossing, a ford or a ferry-boat, not a planetary body. [5] [6] [10] [11]

The MUL.APIN compendium, compiled around 1000 BCE, makes the term’s astronomical application explicit. At lines I.i 36–38, the text identifies Nibiru directly with Jupiter (SAG.ME.GAR), describing it as a star that “divides the sky in half and stands there” at the boundary between the paths of Enlil and Anu, and labels it the star of Marduk. Mainstream Assyriology, including Francesca Rochberg’s work, treats this Jupiter-Marduk identification as the dominant referent because of the consistent pairing in the omen literature. The compendium’s empirical observations, not mythic narrative, anchor the term in the regular motion of Jupiter, the star of Marduk. [5] [6] [12]

The Enuma Elish reinforces rather than contradicts that identification. Tablet VII, line 124 declares Nibiru as one of Marduk’s fifty names: “As (49) Ne-beru let him hold the crossing place of heaven and underworld.” The function described is station-keeping at a celestial juncture — a fixed reference point where other bodies pause — not a destructive planet. The Epic’s other central figure, Tiamat, fares no better as a planet candidate: she is the primordial goddess of salt-water chaos whose body Marduk splits to form the heavens and earth, with the Tigris and Euphrates flowing from her eyes and her tail arched overhead as the Milky Way. The poem itself praises Marduk as the most powerful of the gods. The humans of the text are made by Ea, on Marduk’s plan, from the blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s general, to serve the gods. [5] [13] [14]

Zecharia Sitchin built his framework on a different reading. In The 12th Planet (1976), Sitchin interpreted the Anunnaki as an extraterrestrial race that came to Earth from Nibiru, which he counted as the twelfth member of the solar system. Sitchin proposed that Nibiru had a highly elliptical 3,630-year orbit as the twelfth member of the solar system, and that its collision with a planet called Tiamat (placed by Sitchin between Mars and Jupiter) destroyed Tiamat and formed Earth, the asteroid belt, and the Moon. He further claimed the Anunnaki genetically engineered Homo sapiens by crossing Anunnaki and Homo erectus DNA to produce slave workers for gold mining, motivated by the need for gold particles to repair Nibiru’s atmosphere. In Sitchin’s reading, the slain Tiamat becomes a watery planet between Mars and Jupiter whose destruction by Nibiru formed Earth, the asteroid belt, and the Moon. Mainstream scholarship has rejected this on every front. [8] [17]

Michael S. Heiser’s systematic review found no cuneiform text in the entire corpus that identifies Nibiru as a planet beyond Pluto, connects it with the Anunnaki, or describes a 3,600-year orbital cycle. The thousands of cuneiform lexical lists compiled by Mesopotamian scribes themselves preserve the conventional meanings of these terms and would have refuted Sitchin’s translations had he consulted them. Dynamical astronomy adds a simpler test: a body on the orbit Sitchin described would destabilize the inner solar system within a few revolutions and should have been naked-eye visible to any observer on Earth by 2012 — and no such object has been reported. [15] [16]

The cuneiform record also exposes the elasticity of the Anunnaki claim. An omen tablet from the Kouyunjik collection, K.6174 line 9’, reads: “If Mercury divides the sky and stands there, [its name] is Nibiru” — demonstrating that the term was applied to whichever visible planet happened to occupy a particular celestial crossing. The Anunnaki themselves, in actual Sumerian and Akkadian sources, are a major group of deities (the name possibly means “princely offspring”), not extraterrestrials; in the Atrahasis epic the Igigi, a younger generation of gods, are forced to labour for them. Michael S. Heiser’s survey of the cuneiform attestations concludes that Nibiru is called a star in the texts and, as a planet, is identified “nearly always” with Jupiter-Marduk, only once with Mercury, and “never anything beyond Pluto or the known planets”. Sitchin’s planet is a modern construction, projected onto texts that record empirical Babylonian astronomy and Marduk-centered theology. [5] [21] [28]

Mainstream Assyriology’s Rejection of Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin (1920–2010) published The 12th Planet in 1976, launching the Earth Chronicles series with a sweeping claim: the Anunnaki were extraterrestrials from a twelfth planet called Nibiru, traveling on a 3,600-year elliptical orbit to mine gold on Earth, and their leader Enki genetically engineered modern humans by combining Anunnaki DNA with Homo erectus. The books sold millions of copies, but specialist reception was almost uniformly negative. Mainstream Assyriologists, Sumerologists, Orientalists, and anthropologists resoundingly rejected the work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory, citing flawed methodology, mistranslations of cuneiform, the ignoring of archaeological and historical evidence, and incorrect astronomical claims. Sitchin’s training was as a journalist and economic historian, not a credentialed specialist in the ancient Near East. That distinction matters, because the debates over his work turn on philology, astronomy, and tradition-history — fields in which his formal credentials were absent. [17] [18] [19] [20]

The first collision point is the Anunnaki themselves. In actual cuneiform sources, the Anunnaki (Sumerian Anuna; Akkadian Anunnaki) are a category of deities whose name possibly means “princely offspring”, and who in myth are the descendants of An and Ki — anthropomorphic members of the Mesopotamian pantheon, not extraterrestrials. Their primary function in Sumerian literature was to decree the fates of humanity and serve as divine judges; in Inanna’s Descent into the Netherworld they appear as seven judges of the underworld. The group is inconsistent across texts — one composition names as many as fifty Anunnaki associated with Eridu, while another names only seven — and no complete roster has survived. Very little evidence of a collective Anunnaki cult has been found and no depiction of the group as a whole, likely because each Anunnaki deity had its own cult. [21]

The second collision point is the astronomical term Sitchin built his hypothesis on. Biblical scholar Michael S. Heiser, who maintained the “Sitchin Is Wrong” site, examined the cuneiform occurrences of the word Nibiru and reached a categorical conclusion: in actual Mesopotamian texts, the term refers to the planet Jupiter, occasionally Mercury, the god Marduk, or a generic star — never to a hidden planet beyond Pluto. In Babylonian astronomy Jupiter was the star of the god Marduk. The Sumerian cosmological scheme mapped specific celestial bodies to specific deities — Inanna to Venus, Utu to the Sun, Nanna to the Moon, An to equatorial stars, Enlil to northern stars, and Enki to southern stars — with no slot for a “twelfth planet” or trans-Plutonian body. The MUL.APIN compendium, compiled around 1000 BCE, identifies Nibiru with Jupiter and contains no reference to it as a hidden body beyond Pluto. A planet with a 3,600-year elliptical orbit, as Sitchin described, would gravitationally destabilize the inner solar system on geological timescales, and if it were currently near perihelion would already be visible to the global amateur astronomical community — yet no such object has ever been observed. The 1984 Astrophysical Journal Letters infrared survey paper repeatedly cited by Nibiru proponents as evidence of an unknown planet was followed up: most of the “no counterpart” sources turned out to be distant galaxies, and none were identified as planets. [15] [16] [21] [22] [28] [29]

But the deepest collision is over Sitchin’s signature reading of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic on seven tablets, most likely composed in the late second millennium BCE (often dated to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, 12th century BCE), recovered from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh from 1849 onward and first published by George Smith in 1876. In the actual cuneiform text, Tiamat is a primordial goddess of the salt waters — paired with Apsu, the freshwater god — whose mingled waters give birth to the younger gods. Marduk does defeat Tiamat in combat, but he splits her body into two halves to form the heavens and the earth, with the Tigris and Euphrates flowing from her eyes — a cosmogonic act, not a description of a destroyed planet. Humanity in the epic is created not by genetic engineering but from the blood of Kingu, Tiamat’s defeated commander, in order to relieve the gods of their labor burden. The Atrahasis epic gives a parallel etiology: the Igigi, a junior generation of gods, rebel against the Anunnaki’s labor demands, and the god Enki creates humans from clay mixed with a slain god’s blood to replace them. W. G. Lambert, one of the foremost Assyriologists of the twentieth century and editor of the standard critical edition of the Enuma Elish, demonstrated that the composer adapted older Sumerian traditions about the god Ninurta slaying a monster and recast them around Marduk — a literary-religious composition legitimizing Marduk’s kingship over the older Sumerian/Akkadian gods and Babylon’s political-cultural hegemony, not an account of planetary destruction. The combat motif has parallels elsewhere in the ancient Near East, and the epic’s main theme is Marduk’s elevation to kingship over the gods. Sitchin’s parallel reading — that the Enuma Elish encodes a planetary collision in which Nibiru shattered Tiamat into Earth and the asteroid belt — is an interpretation overlaid on the cuneiform text by Sitchin in 1976, not a reading derived from the texts themselves. [2] [3]

Sitchin’s broader method depended on mistranslating key Sumerian and Akkadian terms, taking mythological figures as literal extraterrestrials, and misreading the lexical and astronomical record. His rendering of the Hebrew nephilim as “those who came down” or “people of the fiery rockets” has been characterized as linguistically impossible given the Hebrew philology. The same habit of reading a literary figure as a literal biographical record is what Heiser’s lexical critique targets: the terms Sitchin mistranslates are ordinary words with ordinary attestations. His publishers presented him as able to read Sumerian and Akkadian directly from clay tablets, but his formal education was in economic history, and Heiser documents basic philological errors in his work. Sitchin asked scientists in 2010 to test the DNA of the 4,500-year-old remains of the Sumerian queen Puabi for traces of the visitors he claimed to be behind the Anunnaki. The evidence resolves the core questions cleanly: Nibiru in cuneiform sources refers to Jupiter or Marduk, not a trans-Plutonian planet; the Anunnaki are a divine category descended from An, not an alien species; the Enuma Elish is a theogony/cosmogony legitimizing Marduk’s kingship, not an astronomical record. What remains unresolved is why, in the face of that evidence, the Sitchin synthesis continues to attract adherents in popular media — a question that belongs less to cuneiform scholarship than to the sociology of alternative history. [15] [18] [19]

Connecting the Dots

In the Enuma Elish, fresh water (Apsu) and salt water (Tiamat) open the cosmos as primordial waters whose commingling produces the younger gods. Tiamat’s name derives from the Akkadian word tiamtum, “sea” — she personifies the primordial salt sea and is associated with chaos, not any planetary body. After Marduk defeats her, her body becomes raw material for constructing sky, earth, rivers, and mountains: a cosmogonic dissection following a theogonic battle, with no reference to a destroyed planet in the surviving text. The Anunnaki appear in the Enuma Elish as a category of deities — 600 of the underworld and 300 of heaven in a late recension — assigned positions by Marduk, anthropomorphic gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon rather than extraterrestrials. The text was composed in Akkadian on seven tablets in the late 2nd millennium BCE, recovered primarily from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh and first published by George Smith in 1876, and served the primary purpose of elevating Marduk as patron of Babylon above other Mesopotamian gods. [2] [4] [14] [21] [23] [24]

Sitchin’s re-reading maps these same divine figures onto a planetary system: Apsu becomes the Sun, and Tiamat a primordial planet shattered in a collision with an invading “twelfth planet” called Nibiru, so that one half becomes Earth and the other the asteroid belt. This translation does not survive contact with the cuneiform record. The attested Mesopotamian astronomical texts pair Jupiter with Marduk and Venus with Ishtar, but Sitchin’s god-to-planet equations, such as Apsu=Sun and Tiamat=primordial planet, do not match the attested Mesopotamian god=planet lists. In MUL.APIN (ca. 1000 BCE), Nibiru is explicitly equated with Jupiter (SAG.ME.GAR), the “star of Marduk, the Ford”. Outside astronomy the Akkadian word denoted geographical river crossings, ferry fees, ferry-boats, and place names — never a trans-Plutonian planet. Sitchin was an economics journalist and shipping industry executive who taught himself to read cuneiform; no verified degree-level credential in Sumerian or Akkadian is attested. [5] [6] [15] [17]

Where the Enuma Elish does invoke celestial phenomena, it describes order, not catastrophe. The text presents Marduk as establishing structured celestial ordering, including constructing stations for the great gods, setting the constellations as their likeness, determining the year and its seasons, and making the crescent moon appear. In Tablet VII, Nibiru is presented as Marduk’s star within this framework of celestial ordering. These passages map directly onto the actual practice of Babylonian celestial observation recorded in MUL.APIN, where Nibiru is identified with Jupiter [5]. The cylinder seal Sitchin relied upon (VA 243), which he interpreted as showing 12 solar-system bodies, bears an inscription that specialists read as “You’re his servant”, and its central symbol and dots are read as stars, not as the Sun and planets. The text makes clear that it was Apsu, not Tiamat, who initiated the conflict — Tiamat prepared for battle only to avenge Apsu’s downfall — a narrative sequence Sitchin collapsed into a single Marduk-versus-Tiamat planetary collision. The mythological texts, the astronomical compendia, the lexical dictionaries, the iconography of VA 243, and the lack of professional Sumerological credentials all point in the same direction: the Enuma Elish describes a theogonic battle of deities establishing cosmic and celestial order, and the Anunnaki/Nibiru/Tiamat planet-collision narrative is a twentieth-century construction that the cuneiform sources do not support. [1] [15] [17]

The Other Side

The cuneiform record offers no support for Sitchin’s identification of Nibiru as a trans-Plutonian planet. In MUL.APIN, the standard Babylonian astronomical compendium whose heliacal risings and settings fit the region of Assur at around 1370 ± 100 BCE according to Schaefer, or roughly 1400–1100 BCE according to de Jong, Nibiru appears as a synonym for Jupiter under the logogram SAG.ME.GAR. Two omen tablets from the Kouyunjik collection, K.6174:9’ and K.12769:6’, instead identify the term with Mercury, and in a 1961 article on Enuma Elish Tablet V, Landsberger and Kinnier Wilson proposed that Nibiru might be the pole star, an idea Heiser reports without evaluating it. Across more than a millennium of Babylonian astronomical writing, no text uses Nibiru to denote a planet beyond Pluto, and no Enuma Elish passage describes a planetary collision producing Earth and the asteroid belt. The mainstream reading treats the term as a flexible technical label variously applied to Jupiter, Mercury, or a marker of the autumnal equinox — interpretations grounded in Babylonian observational astronomy but consistent with none of Sitchin’s specific claims. [5] [28] [29]

What We Actually Know

The strongest evidence in Sitchin’s favor is structural rather than textual. The Enuma Elish does describe a cosmic battle in which a goddess’s body is split to form the raw material of the world — Tiamat’s eyes become the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, her breasts become mountains, and her two halves are spread as sky and earth. That image is genuinely striking, and it has sustained an interpretive tradition that reads the text as cosmological allegory. Nibiru is also a real Babylonian astronomical term attested in MUL.APIN and other texts. And there does exist at least one academic paper that frames Sitchin’s reading as an “astronomical interpretation” worth testing against the evidence [25]. These are not nothing. They explain why the hypothesis has persisted for nearly fifty years.

The textual record, however, points in a different direction. Tiamat is consistently described across all recensions as a primordial goddess of salt water and chaos — consort of Apsu, mother of the younger gods whose waters commingle — never as a destroyed planet or celestial body. The Enuma Elish contains no reference to a destroyed planet, a twelfth planet, or any extraterrestrial body. The cosmic battle is initiated by Apsu, not Tiamat, and Marduk’s combat with her has parallels in other ancient Near Eastern combat myths, although the once common view that the Tiamat myth is one of the earliest versions of the “Chaoskampf” is no longer taken for granted. The Anunnaki are high gods of the pantheon, descendants of An and Ki whose primary function was to decree fates, not extraterrestrials or visitors from another planet. The text was identified, published, and translated by mainstream Assyriology beginning with George Smith in 1876, a full century before Sitchin’s The 12th Planet. [4] [21] [24]

Plausible but uncertain threads remain. The Enuma Elish does perform a “silent displacement” of the goddess Ishtar, splitting her qualities and reassigning them to Marduk — circumstantial traces of her presence appear in three sections even though she is never named [26]. The text is both theogonic (Apsu/Tiamat → Lahmu/Lahamu → Anshar/Kishar → Anu → Ea) and cosmogonic (Tablet V’s creation of sky, earth, stars, moon, rivers from Tiamat’s dissected body), though the primary compositional function remains political-theological legitimation of Marduk’s supremacy as Babylon’s patron, embedded in the Akitu festival recitation context. Landsberger and Kinnier Wilson proposed that Nibiru in Tablet V might be the pole star rather than a planet, though in astronomical texts the term most often names Jupiter. In some Babylonian texts Nibiru marks the autumnal equinox: the Nibiru constellation, in the area of Libra, rose in the month Tišritum. [5] [28]

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