The Library
Ten texts · download as PDF, EPUB or plain text
This site is named after the Anunnaki. It seems only fair to hand you the tablets and let you check for yourself.
Before you start
Everything here is free to download and keep, not just to read. Where a text exists as a public domain scan, you get the PDF, the plain text and an e-reader file.
There is a catch that shapes the whole library. The tablets are three thousand years old and belong to nobody, while the translations are copyrighted works like any other book.
So what you can read freely splits into two piles. There are translations old enough to be out of copyright, mostly Victorian and Edwardian, and there are a few academic projects that publish openly. Much of this is therefore over a century old, and Assyriology has moved a very long way since. I'd rather tell you that than let you assume a 1902 text is current.
The men who first cracked cuneiform were brilliant and were working almost blind, with broken tablets, an incomplete dictionary, and firm expectations about what they were going to find. Watch for the expectations. You can often catch a translator reaching for a biblical word where the Akkadian is ambiguous, and that reach is its own kind of evidence about the 1870s.
Mesopotamia
Enuma Elish: the Babylonian creation epic
Marduk kills the chaos goddess Tiamat, splits her body into sky and earth, and orders the cosmos. The Anunnaki are the assembly of great gods assigned their stations; they build Babylon in gratitude. Humanity is made from the blood of a defeated god, explicitly so the gods can stop working.
The Sumerian King List
It opens: after the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug. Then it lists kings. Alulim ruled 28,800 years. Alalgar ruled 36,000. En-men-lu-ana, 43,200. Eight kings across five cities, totalling hundreds of thousands of years. Then the flood sweeps over, and afterwards the reigns drop abruptly to human lengths.
This is the strangest document in Mesopotamian literature and one of the least read. If you open only one link on this page, make it this one.
Those pre-flood numbers get waved away as mythological inflation, and that is probably right. But look at the shape of the list rather than the figures. Enormous reigns, then a flood, then suddenly ordinary human lifespans, as though the scribes are marking a boundary between two different kinds of time, and everything before it belongs to a category they no longer had access to.
What if the numbers aren't years in our sense at all, but a notation for before the reckoning, a way of writing "we cannot count this far back, and we know we cannot"? Every culture that keeps records eventually hits the edge of what it can verify. What does a Sumerian scribe write when he reaches that edge? Possibly: 28,800.
No way to test it. But a list that marks its own horizon of knowledge would be a far more interesting document than a list that simply lies.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
A king who is two-thirds god, a wild man made to humble him, a friendship, a death, and a journey to the one man who survived the flood to ask him how he did it. Tablet XI holds the deluge account: the boat, the mountain, the birds sent out to find land.
It is also, underneath the monsters, a book about refusing to accept that you will die, and failing.
The Chaldean Account of Genesis
In 1872 a self-taught British Museum employee was sorting broken tablets and found a flood story centuries older than Genesis. The story goes that he became so agitated he began undressing in the reading room. It made headlines worldwide and permanently changed how the Bible was read.
His book collects the flood account, creation fragments, the descent of Ishtar and the Gilgamesh cycle. Read it as the birth certificate of Assyriology.
Inana's Descent to the Nether World
The goddess descends through seven gates, surrendering something at each, and arrives stripped before her sister Ereshkigal. Here the Anunnaki are not "the gods" in general. They are seven specific judges of the underworld, and they sentence her to death.
The clearest demonstration that Anunnaki does not name a fixed cast of characters. It shifts meaning between texts and periods.
The Descent of Ishtar into the Lower World
The same journey, told later and in Akkadian, and noticeably bleaker. The underworld is the house from which no one who enters comes out, the road whose path does not turn back, where dust is their food and clay their bread.
Reading this beside the Sumerian version is the best short lesson available in how a story changes as it crosses a language.
Read in full →Atrahasis: why humans exist
The most important Anunnaki text, and the one you cannot legally read free online. So here is what it says.
The senior gods, the Anunnaki, have the junior gods, the Igigi, digging irrigation canals and maintaining the rivers. After forty years the Igigi revolt, burn their tools and surround Enlil's house. To break the strike, the gods create humanity: clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slaughtered god, so people carry something divine while taking over the work.
That is the origin of "humans were made as workers for the gods". Note what is not there: no spacecraft, no other planet, no gold mining, no genetic engineering. It is a religious explanation for why life is hard.
Strip Atrahasis of its gods for a moment and look at the plot. A labouring population works itself past breaking point on infrastructure: canals, river maintenance, the unglamorous work that keeps a floodplain habitable. They revolt. The response is to create a new class of workers to take over the job.
That is not a story about the cosmos. That is a story about Mesopotamia, written by people living in a society that ran on exactly this arrangement. What if the strangest thing about Atrahasis is not what it says about the gods, but that somebody around 1800 BCE wrote down a successful labour strike and placed it at the centre of the creation of humanity?
Speculation, obviously. But every myth was written by someone with a life, and this one reads like it was written by someone who had watched a work gang throw down its tools.
Egypt
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Not a book, and not quite about death. It is a collection of spells to be spoken on the journey through the afterlife, including the weighing of the heart against a feather. Budge's edition includes the hieroglyphic text with interlinear transliteration, so you can see the machinery.
The Pyramid Texts, and the wider Egyptian collection
The oldest substantial religious writing we have from anywhere: funerary spells carved into the walls of Old Kingdom pyramid chambers, meant to carry the king into the sky and among the stars. A thousand years older than the Book of the Dead.
If you have read about Egyptian stellar religion and wanted the actual source rather than somebody's summary of it, this is where to go. The same collection holds the Book of Gates, the Am-Tuat and Budge's other volumes.
Go further
The full Sumerian corpus
Past the famous texts: hymns, laments, a debate between grain and sheep, letters from kings to officials about irrigation, proverbs, schoolroom exercises. It is not designed to be easy reading. It is designed to be accurate, which is better.
Narrative & myth → Everything →Here is what gets me about that catalogue, and it has nothing to do with gods. Scroll past the myths and you reach the letters. A king writing about missing troops. A complaint about irrigation work. A man worried about his father's household.
Four thousand years ago somebody was annoyed about a canal and wrote it down, and you can read it this afternoon for free. What if that is the actual miracle here? Not that the tablets describe gods descending, but that the ordinary irritations of a Tuesday in Ur survived the collapse of every civilisation in between and landed in your browser?
What this library is for
Plenty of people will tell you what the Sumerian tablets say. Far fewer will hand you the tablets. The point is that you don't have to take anyone's word for it, mine included.
Read Enuma Elish and see whether you find what you were told was in it. Read the King List and decide for yourself what those numbers are doing. That's the whole idea.
About these sources
- Internet Sacred Text Archive (sacred-texts.com) is a long-running archive of religious and mythological texts that are out of copyright.
- Project Gutenberg publishes public domain books in clean digital editions.
- ETCSL, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, University of Oxford, is the standard open academic corpus of Sumerian literature. Free to read and cite with attribution; the translations remain the project's copyright.
Last reviewed September 2026. External links are checked when this page is updated, but sites move. If one is broken, or you know a better edition, tell me and it gets fixed.