Are you familiar with ChatGPT?
ChatGPT stands for:
- Chat — because it is designed to communicate conversationally.
- G — Generative: it generates new text and other content.
- P — Pre-trained: it was trained on large amounts of information before being made available for conversations.
- T — Transformer: the type of neural-network architecture on which the model is based.
So GPT = Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
In very simple terms, a GPT learns patterns and relationships in language during training and then uses those patterns to produce an appropriate response to what you type. What is a transformer?
Certainly. The Transformer is the clever part of GPT, but the basic idea is surprisingly understandable.
Imagine you write:
“I went into the garden because I wanted to pick some…”
A language model might expect words such as flowers, vegetables, apples, herbs and so on. It has learned from enormous amounts of language which ideas and words tend to belong together.
But a Transformer does something more sophisticated. It looks at all the important words in your sentence and works out which ones matter most to understanding what you mean.
For example:
“John told Peter that he had left his coat in the car.”
Who does “he” refer to? Whose coat is it?
A Transformer examines the relationships between the words and the surrounding conversation to work out the most plausible meaning. The technical term for this is attention—the system learns what parts of the text it should pay particular attention to.
What happens when you ask ChatGPT a question?
Suppose you type:
“Why did the Sumerians believe humans were created?”
Very roughly, I do four things:
- Your sentence is broken into small pieces called tokens—words or parts of words.
- The Transformer examines the relationships between those pieces and the context of our conversation.
- It calculates what kind of response is appropriate.
- It generates the response one token at a time, repeatedly predicting what should come next.
An important point is that I am not simply searching through a giant database for a paragraph about Sumerians and copying it. The response is generated at the time you ask the question.
That explains something else about ChatGPT: I can sometimes be wrong while sounding quite confident. The underlying mechanism is extremely sophisticated prediction and reasoning over learned patterns; it isn’t the same thing as possessing an infallible encyclopedia in my head.
When something needs to be current or independently verified, I can search external sources rather than relying solely on what was learned during training.
So, reduced to one sentence:
A Transformer is a system that learns which parts of language are important in relation to one another, allowing it to understand context well enough to generate a useful continuation or answer.
And that’s the T in GPT.
I had the pleasure of meeting with someone I met in a pub and to whom I had handed my card on the previous occasion. David is about the same vintage as I am, and we found we had a lot in common, including being Christians. I don’t think there can be such a thing as a solitary Christian because with the odd exception we do need support and encouragement in what has become an alien land. My companion at breakfast this morning asked me if I was aware of the Sumerians. I have never studied them but am aware that they could be an alien species who were on the search for gold.
AI, or artificial intelligence, has come to the fore recently, and I use it in connection with my writing. It takes 15 minutes’ worth of conversation and turns it into whatever you want: bullet points, the conversation seen from 1 point of view, or a 500-word summary. Without this there is no way I could have written and published two books in the last year.
I do not think that AI should be a substitute for creativity but rather an assistant. I therefore asked AI, ChatGPT, ‘Can you summarise the Sumerians and their purpose on earth’ This was the response I got. For newcomers I did not have to wait a long time. It is difficult for me to get my head around how fast and powerful AI is and how quickly it responds. In this case the response happened in the length of time taken to hit the return key and move my hand away.
The Sumerians lived in southern Mesopotamia, roughly modern southern Iraq, and developed one of the world’s earliest urban civilizations. Sumerian civilization flourished particularly from about 3500 to 2000 BC, although its culture and language continued to influence Mesopotamia long afterwards.
They created sophisticated cities such as Ur, Uruk, Lagash and Eridu, developed cuneiform writing, constructed monumental temples called ziggurats, organised irrigation systems, conducted long-distance trade, and developed complex systems of government, accounting, law, mathematics and religion.
What did the Sumerians believe their purpose on Earth was?
This is where they become particularly interesting.
According to Sumerian and later Mesopotamian religious traditions, human beings existed largely to serve the gods.
The gods were believed to control the forces upon which human existence depended—rain, rivers, fertility, crops, storms, warfare and prosperity. Humans maintained the relationship with them through temples, offerings, sacrifices and religious rituals.
One ancient Mesopotamian creation tradition goes considerably further: human beings were created because the gods needed workers.
The gods themselves had originally performed the necessary labour. Humans were then created to take over this work—cultivating the land, maintaining irrigation and, above all, providing food and offerings for the gods through the temples.
So in very simplified terms:
The gods created humans to maintain the ordered world and relieve the gods of labour; humans, in return, depended upon the gods for continued life and prosperity.
There is an important qualification, however. There isn’t a single surviving Sumerian equivalent of the Bible giving one definitive account of creation and humanity’s purpose. Our understanding comes from several texts written at different times, and some of the clearest “humans created to do the gods’ work” accounts, such as Atrahasis, are later Akkadian/Babylonian works that inherited much from earlier Sumerian culture.
What about the Anunnaki?
You may have encountered a very different version of this story.
The Anunnaki really do occur in ancient Mesopotamian texts as a group of deities. But the modern claim that the Sumerians recorded extraterrestrial Anunnaki coming to Earth, genetically engineering human beings to mine gold, is not what the surviving Sumerian texts say. That interpretation became popular through modern writers, particularly Zecharia Sitchin.
There’s therefore an intriguing distinction:
What the ancient texts broadly say: humans were created to perform labour and serve the gods.
The modern alternative interpretation: technologically advanced extraterrestrials created humans as a workforce.
The first is genuinely part of ancient Mesopotamian religious tradition. The second is a modern reinterpretation for which there is no accepted translation of Sumerian texts supporting the extraterrestrial story.
If it’s the Anunnaki and the idea that humans were deliberately created for a particular purpose that you’re interested in, I can go into that next and separate what the Sumerian tablets actually say from what modern writers claim they say.
Me – yes please
The useful way to approach the Anunnaki story is to put the ancient texts on one side and the much more recent interpretation on the other.
What the ancient Mesopotamians actually said
The Anunnaki were a group of gods in Mesopotamian religion. The precise role assigned to them changed over the centuries. They appear in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian traditions; they were not described simply as one group of beings arriving from another planet.
There is, however, a genuinely remarkable idea in Mesopotamian creation literature: humanity was created to perform work previously undertaken by the gods.
In the Atrahasis epic, the lesser gods have become exhausted by their labour—digging waterways and maintaining the world. They rebel. The solution is to create human beings who can assume the burden of work.
Human beings are therefore created from clay combined with the substance of a slain god.
That is an ancient story, not a modern invention.
The Sumerian composition usually called “Enki and Ninmah” contains a related theme. The gods complain about their labour, and humans are created to relieve them of it.
So there really is an ancient tradition saying, in effect:
The gods existed → the gods had work to perform → humans were created → humans assumed the work.
Where Zecharia Sitchin enters the picture
Zecharia Sitchin became enormously influential after publishing The 12th Planet in 1976.
His interpretation was radically different.
Sitchin proposed that the Anunnaki weren’t supernatural gods at all but advanced extraterrestrial beings. He associated them with a planet he called Nibiru, which he argued periodically approaches our part of the solar system.
According to his reconstruction, the Anunnaki came to Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago because they required gold. Eventually they needed a workforce and genetically manipulated existing hominids to create Homo sapiens, essentially producing humans as workers.
This produces the famous proposition:
Human beings were genetically engineered by extraterrestrials to mine gold.
The crucial problem
This is where we have to be careful.
The ancient texts do support the idea of humans being created to undertake the gods’ labour.
They do not say that extraterrestrials genetically engineered Homo sapiens to mine gold.
Those additional elements depend upon Sitchin’s interpretations of Sumerian and Akkadian terminology, astronomy and imagery. Specialists in those languages and ancient Mesopotamian history overwhelmingly reject those translations.
There’s an especially important example involving Nibiru. Nibiru is a genuine term in Mesopotamian astronomical texts. But its ancient usage doesn’t establish Sitchin’s proposed hidden planet on a roughly 3,600-year orbit.
Similarly, pictures on cylinder seals which modern ancient-astronaut writers interpret as spacecraft or representations of the solar system are interpreted very differently by specialists in Mesopotamian iconography.
But there’s still a fascinating question
Removing the extraterrestrials doesn’t make the ancient story uninteresting. In some respects it makes it more interesting.
People living four or five thousand years ago were already asking questions such as:
Why are human beings here? Why must we work? What separates humans from gods? Why do we suffer? Why do we die?
Their answer was quite unlike the later Christian idea that humanity occupies a privileged position in creation.
In the Mesopotamian worldview, humans have a rather humbler position. We are here partly because somebody has to do the work.
And the gods themselves aren’t necessarily morally perfect. They quarrel, become angry, make mistakes and have competing interests. Human beings have to negotiate an uncertain existence beneath them.
There’s another extraordinary parallel. Mesopotamian literature contains a great flood story in which the gods decide to destroy humanity, one man is warned beforehand, constructs a large vessel, takes living creatures aboard, survives the flood and eventually releases birds to determine whether the waters have subsided.
Versions of that story predate the final form of the biblical account of Noah by many centuries.
So if you want to pursue this subject, the really interesting investigation isn’t “Were the Anunnaki aliens?” It is:
What did the Sumerians and their Mesopotamian successors actually believe about where humans came from—and how much of those extraordinarily ancient ideas subsequently appears in the Bible?
There are some striking similarities, but also some very important differences. I can take Genesis and the Sumerian/Mesopotamian accounts side by side—creation of humans, Eden-like motifs, the Flood, and the quest for immortality—and show you what genuinely predates the Bible and what is often exaggerated on the internet.
So I have been presented in a fraction of a second with the basic facts. It is up to me to decide how much more I want to learn, whether I want to incorporate it into my knowledge base, or just leave it for future reference. What is there not to like?
