How come zacaria sitchen goes against against other Sumerian scholars? If you actually look into the facts, they never knew about 12 planets, they have one seal which is this
There is not a single text in the entire corpus of Sumerian or Mesopotamian tablets in the world that tells us the Sumerians (or later inhabitants of Mesopotamia) knew there were more than five planets. This is quite a claim, but is demonstrable through the work of scholars who specialize in cuneiform astronomy. Below I list all the major works on cuneiform astronomy (catalogues of texts, dissertations / books) and invite readers to check them out of a library and look for themselves. Literally every cuneiform text that has any astronomical comment (even with respect to astrology and omens) has been translated, catalogued, indexed, and discussed in the available academic literature. The tablets are often quite detailed, even discussing mathematical calculations of the appearance of planetary bodies in the sky, on the horizon, and in relation to other stars. The field is by no means new, and is considerably developed.
The seal is transliterated (the Sumero-Akkadian signs in English letters) and translated in the principal publication of the Berlin Vorderasiatische Museum’s publication of its seal collection, Vorderasiatische Rollsiegel (“West Asian Cylinder Seals”; 1940) by Mesopotamian scholar Anton Moortgat on page 101. This book is in German, so I offer the German and an English translation:
Line 1 = dub-si-ga “Dubsiga” [a personal name of an apparently powerful personc]
Line 2 = ili-il-la-at “Ili-illat” [another personal name, this time of the seal’s owner]
Line 3 = ir3-su “dein Knecht” [German for “your servant”d]
So the full (rather boring) inscription of line one reads: “Dubsiga, Ili-illat, your/his servant.” Nothing in the inscription suggests anything remotely to do with astronomy or planets.
In an email correspondence with Dr. Rudi Mayr, whose dissertation was on cylinder seals, Dr. Mayr commented on the inscriptions and the seal [and I interject a few comments in blue]:
“The seated figure is a god; the ‘flounced’ garment is normal for deities (though kings start wearing them a little later); deities also have the distinctive headdress. Most scholars call it a ‘horned’ headdress, but I’ve always thought it looked more like flames than horns. Ancient texts often refer to deities having a bright, shining, brilliant aspect [this is true across the ancient near east – witness the “shining one” terminology I discuss in The Façade and in several papers on my website]; they don’t mention horns . . . The introducing figure also has the ‘horns’ of divinity” [this is a strong contextual argument that the symbol – again, it’s not the “sun” – to the upper left of the introducing figure is a star. Precisely because they SHINE, stars were associated with deities. Shamash, the sun god, had his own symbol of the sun.