Anunnaki: Origin of Sumeria
A Short Story by Michael Finney
Between the Tigris and the Euphrates — in the land the ancients called Mesopotamia — the Sumerian civilization rose to prominence in ways that historians still debate. Anunnaki: Origin of Sumeria steps into that debate not with evidence but with narrative, imagining the connection between the mysterious Anunnaki and the birth of one of humanity's earliest civilizations.
I think, like many people’s awareness, the Anunnaki and Sumerian connection was first popularized for me by Zachariah Sitchin, but it soon broke containment. Some media combined aspects of his perspectives with even earlier material from H.P. Lovecraft, like At the Mountains of Madness. For me, it was always compelling as a platform that can be speculated upon, we can still wonder, and that makes the territory ripe for imagination in all different forms.
The Short Film
An animated short film is available on [Filmzie](https://filmzie.com/content/anunnaki-origin-of-sumeria--2025). The film puts into motion the imagined world of the story, utilizing the same imagery that appears in the ebook. It is a short film in the truest sense — compact, atmospheric, and designed to leave more questions than it answers with a runtime just over five minutes.
This project had been in minor development for a few months before the bulk of the work was done to complete the animated short. In late 2024, generative video models still had trouble combining and maintaining stability when two vastly different image styles were present in the scene.
The Story
Anunnaki: Origin of Sumeria is also a short story told in word and image. It is categorized as a graphic narrative — a deliberate choice to let the visual language carry as much weight as the prose. The Anunnaki are not explained. They are shown. The result is closer to myth than to science fiction, which is the point: Sumeria itself was built on myth, and this story honors that tradition through the first-person narrative of Bilgamesh.
Available as an [ebook on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9KQYY7W) for $0.99. Published June 2025.
The Audiobook
The audiobook is available on [Audible](https://www.amazon.com/Audible-Anunnaki-Origin-of-Sumeria/dp/B0FD4RXS2K). As with all of my work, I narrate it myself and produced the audioplay version as well.
This piece was written in the first person for all renditions and is my first original story that relies so heavily on first-person to tell the story. Additionally, the narrator is a young boy from ancient times, and the dialect that appears in the story attempts to reflect that.
Ancient Mythology, Modern Fiction
The Anunnaki occupy a space in popular culture somewhere between ancient religion and modern conspiracy theory. Like [The Fall of Tartaria](https://michael-finney.com/tartaria.html), another short fiction that dramatizes mythologized ancient civilizations facing forces beyond their understanding, this project treats its source material as raw creative fuel rather than a thesis to prove. The Sumerians built the first cities, invented writing with cuneiform, and created some of the oldest stories ever recorded. Whether the Anunnaki were gods, kings, or something else entirely is a question best answered by storytellers, not scholars — and that is what this project attempts to do.