According to Western scholarship, the Sumerian was the first civilization on our planet and was also highly advanced. Samuel Kramer’s From the Tablets of Sumer gives a list of “firsts” of the Sumerians, for example “the first schools, the first bicameral congress, the first historian, the first pharmacopoeia, the first ‘farmer’s almanac,’ the first cosmogony and cosmology, the first ‘Job,’ the first proverbs and sayings, the first literary debates, the first ‘Noah,’ the first library catalogue; and Man’s first Heroic Age, his first law codes and social reforms, his first medicine, agriculture, and search for world peace and harmony” (Zecharia Sitchin, The Twelfth Planet, p. 40). No one could explain how it came to southern Iraq fully developed, apparently all at once, without any preceding culture from which it evolved.
The Sumerian civilization started about 3800 B.C.E. but no academic scholar was able to explain where it came from or how and why it so suddenly appeared. Astonishingly, in many ways it was more advanced than most later cultures. Its texts describe space travel, genetic engineering, laser weapons, etc., things many people formerly thought were discovered only in the twentieth century.
So where did this highly advanced Sumerian civilization come from? According to Zecharia Sitchin in his book The 12th Planet, the ancient Sumerian texts themselves reveal that it was started by the Anunnaki, extraterrestrials from the planet Nibiru. Nibiru has a very elongated orbit, circling our sun once every 3600 years.
In 3800 B.C.E. Nibiru was near the Earth, and at that time the Anunnaki taught humanity what we today consider civilization. 3600 years earlier, they had introduced farming and pottery making. And hundreds of thousands of years earlier they had genetically engineered Homo sapiens by combining some of their own DNA with that of the ape-man Homo erectus.
A significant feature of Sumerian culture was that cities were dominated by a stepped pyramid, or ziggurat, which had a temple on top where priests were said to meet their “gods” and give them offerings. Each city had its own “deity”, who evidently was the Anunnaki overseeing that location.