The ancient clay tablet, cataloged as CBS 10673, has sat in the basement of the Penn Museum for over a century, dismissed as a fragment of a creation myth. But a full translation completed in 2004 has revealed something far more unsettling: a detailed account of five distinct species that existed before humanity, each destroyed by a different catastrophic event.
Discovered in 1893 at the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur by archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania, the tablet was initially classified as a cosmogonic fragment. For decades, it was considered incomplete and unimportant. Renowned scholar Samuel Noah Kramer translated only its upper portion in 1956, believing it to be another creation story. He set it aside for more promising texts.
The remaining two-thirds of the tablet, covered in dense cuneiform writing arranged in narrow columns, remained unread for nearly 50 years. Its cramped signs made translation difficult, and it was largely ignored until researchers at the Oriental Institute in Chicago finally took a closer look in 2004. What they found did not fit any known category.
The text does not describe the creation of humanity. Instead, it focuses on a time before humans existed, detailing five distinct species, each identified by a unique Sumerian compound name. For each, the tablet provides a physical description, a specific purpose, and the length of its existence. Most strikingly, it details a different method of destruction for each one.
This is not a story of a single catastrophic flood or a vague act of divine punishment. The tablet outlines five separate extinction events, each described with a level of detail rarely seen in surviving cuneiform literature. Scholars have noted that these accounts appear unlike anything else found in the known corpus of ancient Mesopotamian texts.
Since 2011, access to the tablet has reportedly been restricted. The official explanation has been ongoing conservation work, yet no public conservation report has been released in more than a decade. This has fueled speculation and left many questions unanswered about what the tablet actually says.
The text opens during a period the Sumerians called Namlugal. Kramer translated this as the age of lordship, but scholars re-examining the tablet in 2004 suggested a different interpretation. In their view, Namlugal marked a specific era of time, an age defined not by who was in power, but by what kinds of beings inhabited the world.
The first species mentioned is called the Uldu, combining Sumerian terms meaning primordial and to shape or form. According to the text, these beings belonged to both water and stone. They moved without legs and built without hands. The tablet provides clues about their size, describing creatures that may have ranged between 3 and 5 meters in length.
Their purpose is stated in simple terms: they prepared the ground. Then comes the account of their destruction. The text says, The sky burned and the waters turned to powder. It is a striking description that has drawn comparisons to the Permian-Triassic extinction event around 252 million years ago, the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history.
Scientists have found chemical signatures pointing to extreme environmental changes that devastated life across the planet during that period. Evidence pointed to a period of extreme atmospheric heating and severe ocean acidification. In that context, the tablet’s phrase, The waters turned to powder, closely resembles what happens when calcium carbonate-rich oceans experience catastrophic acidification.
The second species named on the tablet is the Girtablilu, a term often translated as great boned form. According to the text, they walked upon the land that the Igigi had prepared. They fed on vegetation, and their bones were described as being like the pillars of a temple. Their extinction came through what the tablet calls fire from the outer darkness.
This phrase is particularly intriguing because the Sumerians typically used this grammatical construction for events believed to originate beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. The description immediately brings to mind the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a massive asteroid impact triggered global devastation. Fire from the sky, a world-changing catastrophe.
Even more striking is the resemblance between the Girtablilu and the giant plant-eating dinosaurs known as sauropods. Massive creatures with enormous skeletal structures, their bones could easily be compared to temple pillars. Whether this similarity is meaningful or merely coincidence remains open to interpretation, but the pattern is difficult to ignore.
The third species is called Ashagar, a term that has sparked more debate among researchers than any other on the tablet. The word appears to be made up of three elements: Ash, meaning singular or one; Me, referring to the divine principles that govern reality; and Gar, meaning to place or establish. Together, the name has been interpreted as those who established the singular law.
The tablet describes them as small but incredibly numerous. They lived within structures built from the earth itself and functioned as a collective rather than as isolated individuals. Then comes one of the strangest lines in the entire text. The scribe writes that they thought with one body, a phrase describing a form of collective behavior.
But it is their extinction that stands out most. The tablet says, The breath of the world changed and the Ashagar could not change with it. Their structures endured but the builders did not. It is a haunting image, a species whose creations survived long after the species itself disappeared.
Paleontologists studying the late Carboniferous period have documented major atmospheric changes that transformed ecosystems and drove widespread biological turnover. Atmospheric oxygen levels during parts of that period may have reached nearly 35 percent, far higher than today. These oxygen-rich conditions allowed some arthropods to grow to extraordinary sizes.
Dragonflies soared with wingspans approaching 70 centimeters, giant millipedes stretched more than 2 meters in length, and scorpion-like creatures grew as large as modern dogs. These organisms spread across vast regions, leaving behind extensive networks of burrows and tunnels that can still be traced in the fossil record today.
As the Earth transitioned into the Permian period, atmospheric oxygen levels began to fall. Many of these giant arthropods relied on passive respiratory systems that were highly dependent on oxygen-rich air. As oxygen declined, their ability to survive declined with it. The tablet describes their end with a simple phrase: The breath of the world changed.
The fourth entry on the tablet introduces a group known as the Lunacur, a name often translated as the near humans of the other land. Of all the species described, they received the most detailed physical portrayal. According to the text, the Lunacur walked upright and used stone tools. They wore animal skins for protection and communicated through sounds that carried meaning.
The tablet describes them as physically stronger than modern humans with heavier bones and thicker skulls that sloped backward where ours are comparatively flat. They lived in caves, cared for their communities, and even buried their dead. Perhaps most intriguing is the claim that they existed alongside the earliest humans for many generations.
Unlike the species described before them, their disappearance was not caused by fire, environmental collapse, or any sudden catastrophe. Instead, the tablet records their end in a remarkably quiet and almost sorrowful way. The new ones came and the Lunacur grew fewer and fewer until the last of them slept and did not wake.
The description has led some researchers to draw comparisons with the Neanderthals, an ancient human relative that lived alongside early modern humans for thousands of years before eventually disappearing. That comparison gained renewed attention in 2010 when Svante Pääbo and his team published the first draft of the Neanderthal genome.
Neanderthals lived alongside modern humans for roughly 5,000 years. During that time, they crafted tools, wore animal skins, and buried their dead in ways that suggest some form of ritual behavior. Physically, they were different from us in several important ways, with denser bones and distinctive sloping skulls.
According to the fossil record, Neanderthal populations did not vanish overnight. As modern humans expanded into Europe and Western Asia, Neanderthal numbers gradually declined. Their final known populations survived in parts of Southern Iberia until around 40,000 years ago. The tablet’s description is strikingly similar to this gradual disappearance.
Then, the tablet reaches its fifth and final entry. The species is called Anshaga, a name often translated as those of the inner heaven. Unlike the previous entries, the tablet provides almost no physical description. Instead, it focuses entirely on what these beings were capable of doing.
According to the text, the Anunnaki knew the counting of all things. They built structures that could move the stars in their vision. They communicated across great distances without sound. Most remarkably, they possessed the me, the divine principles that governed reality, not as gifts from the gods, but as knowledge they had gained through their own understanding.
This distinction is unique. The earlier species are described through their bodies, behaviors, and environments. The Anunnaki are described through knowledge, innovation, and capability. They are the only beings on the tablet portrayed as possessing something beyond simple tools. What the text describes sounds much closer to technology.
But unlike the species before them, their downfall does not come from a natural catastrophe. It comes from themselves. The tablet states, The Anunnaki reached for the fire of the gods, and the fire consumed them. What follows is one of the darkest passages in the entire text.
It says they burned from within. The land beneath them was transformed into glass. The water they relied upon became poisoned. Their descendants were born altered and afflicted for seven generations, until eventually no children were born at all. The passage reads less like a flood or earthquake and more like a civilization destroyed by a force it could not control.
When the translation team published its findings in 2004, one particular footnote attracted more attention than almost anything else in the study. The note stated that the destruction described in the passage showed similarities to the known effects of ionizing radiation on living populations, including acute radiation sickness.
The account contained elements that resembled the melting and vitrification of surface materials, contamination of water sources, and genetic damage passed through multiple generations that could eventually lead to reproductive collapse. It was a remarkable observation, and a controversial one.
Then, in 2005, a geological survey conducted in Rajasthan reported deposits of fused silica glass within layers dated to roughly 2000 BCE. Researchers noted that the material did not display the chemical signatures typically associated with meteorite impacts. Instead, some of its trace element characteristics appeared more similar to trinitite, the glass formed during the first nuclear test at the Trinity site in 1945.
The tablet never explains what happened afterward. It does not tell us whether humanity is the continuation of that same story or the beginning of an entirely new one. Instead, it simply records the fate of a civilization that, according to the text, rose to extraordinary heights before bringing about its own downfall.
Five species, five extinctions. Each one met its end through a different force. The descriptions appear to parallel major events in Earth’s biological history with surprising specificity. The first species is associated with oceans transformed by catastrophic chemical change. The second is linked to a fiery destruction from beyond the sky.
The third perishes when the atmosphere itself changes. The fourth gradually disappears as a newer human population expands across the landscape. And the fifth, a technologically advanced civilization, is destroyed by the very power it sought to control. The pattern is difficult to ignore.
The sequence on the tablet does not match the exact chronological order of known extinction events. Many researchers have pointed to this as evidence against any direct historical correspondence. But in 2019, independent researcher Daniela Morandi proposed a different interpretation, arguing that the tablet was never intended to be chronological at all.
Instead, she suggested that it was organized according to complexity. Viewed this way, the sequence forms a progression rather than a timeline. First come the creatures of water, then the creatures of land, then the collective builders, then the near humans, and finally the technological civilization. Each step represents a higher level of development.
Each species reaches a new stage of capability, and each is ultimately destroyed by a different mechanism. Seen through that lens, the tablet appears to build toward a single question it never directly asks, yet seems to imply throughout its entire structure. If every species before us disappeared, what will happen to us?
The fifth entry offers a chilling possibility. The fire of the gods is not presented as divine punishment. It is not described as a moral judgment. Instead, it appears more like a threshold, a level of knowledge or power that an advanced civilization eventually reaches. And according to the story preserved on this ancient clay tablet, none of the civilizations that reached that threshold survived it.
The scribe who recorded the account does not preach, speculate, or offer warnings. He simply writes down what his tradition claims happened before. Five times a species rose, five times a species vanished. And the order in which they are remembered is not based on when they lived, but on what they had become by the time they were gone.
Since 2011, CBS 10673 has reportedly remained under restricted access, fueling years of speculation. Some researchers claim access requests were denied, public updates were limited, and questions about the tablet’s status have gone unanswered. Yet, the mystery goes beyond the artifact itself.
The text describes five species and five extinctions, each ending in a different way. The final species, the Anunnaki, is said to have possessed advanced knowledge, communication, and technology, only to be destroyed by the very power it achieved. Whether the tablet is history, myth, or something in between remains unknown.
But its central question lingers. If every civilization before us eventually fell, what will happen to us? The ancient scribe offered no explanation and no warning. He simply recorded the story and left the conclusion unfinished. Perhaps that is the sixth ending. Ours.
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