In Memoriam Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin (1922-2010) was an author famous for The Earth Chronicles series of books about the writings of the ancient Sumerians (circa 5,000 years ago) as he interpreted them. He was one of perhaps 200 people in the world, if that many, who could translate cuneiform, the symbolic language of the Sumerians. His work has been very influential on my own.

Since the death of Zecharia Sitchin on October 9, 2010, his critics have come out in droves on the internet to try to trash his work and his legacy. Because of my well-known regard for his work, which I heavily incorporated in Part IV of my book Everything You Know Is Wrong, several people have asked me to come to Zecharia’s defense now that he can no longer do it himself in the vigorous way he was known for. With that said, here is my nutshell defense of his work against any and all criticisms. It is simple and it is true. Please feel free to share it with others on the internet, and/or use it to respond to any critic you care to address.

Anyone who says Zecharia Sitchin is a fraud or mistaken in his translations of Sumerian texts, or anything in that vein, is busily grinding a heavily worn axe. They base all of their complaints on the fact that in certain key areas of the Sumerian writings, he deviates markedly from the “classical” translations, the vast majority of which were completed before 1947, before the terms “UFO” or “alien” came into common usage.

When the early translators came upon passages that could have been and should have been interpreted the way Sitchin interpreted them, they had no conceivable frame of reference for such terminology. Thus, they shoehorned it to fit into their own restricted world views, and because this nonsense was created by “experts” of that time, modern experts are inevitably brainwashed by their education process to believe no other translation is needed, much less preferable.

This intellectual claptrap has become established as the “preferred” and “accepted” translations that critics claim Stichin should have respected and stuck with in the way they are obligated to do. Sitchin rightly jettisoned the nonsense and translated the texts more like they were actually written, calling an alien an alien, so to speak, and this gross offense to modern academic sensibilities is what classic scholars consider a sacrilege to their mindset.

I have no doubt that, in the fullness of time, historians will consider Zecharia Sitchin vastly more correct than any mainstream pundit alive at this moment. Why? Because modern scholars endure years of intense training that forces them to consider the work of prior scholars sacrosanct, which produces a virtual army of close-minded sycophants who, ultimately, will be dismissed as laughably wrong.