Yet, in the shifting glow of the archival lamps, Ningishzida traced a different story — not a hymn, but a logistical directive preserved as worship. "Anu spoke to Enlil: The ship shall be readied, its wings folded for the long path. You shall land in the marsh of Eridu, and with Enki set the measure of the deep shafts, that the stones of the earth be brought to the sky." In Ningishzida's translation, the Abzu was not a mythical abyss but a mineral-rich zone in the African interior, perhaps the Bushveld Igneous Complex, the richest platinum source on the planet. At the British Museum, Moorhen discovered another piece of the puzzle in tablet BM 92687, excavated at Sippar. Long classified as part of an astronomical omen series, the main inscription spoke of star risings, but in the tablet's margin — so faint that it had escaped decades of scholarship — was a side note from the original scribe: "When the red star comes again to the crossing, the lords of the sky shall return to claim the dust of kings." For Moorhen, the red star was Nibiru; the "dust of kings" was refined ore, stockpiled for celestial transport. At the Penn Museum, Ningishzida stood before E 3215, a tablet from Nippur depicting Ninurta triumphant atop what was long thought to be a stylized mountain. "It is no mountain," Ningishzida told the 2021 Symposium on Ancient Technologies. "It is a stepped extraction pit, with sluice channels, tools, and a conveyance system. The god is not a warrior here — he is an engineer overseeing an ore refinery." Between them, Moorhen and Ningishzida pieced together what orthodox Assyriology had resisted for over a century: that the cuneiform record is not allegory, but a preserved industrial logbook of a planetary mission — surveying worlds, building waystations on Mars and its moons, and digging into Earth's crust to remove the metals their home world demanded. As Ningishzida would tell a closed gathering of independent researchers: "The gods came for the same reason we send missions to asteroids today — to mine. Only they had the technology to carry their cargo in tons, not grams."
Ishmael Ningishzida is a well-known Middle Eastern expert on the Anunnaki or ancient gods. He often conducts seminars on the topic and has led several trips to Israel, Egypt, and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey to educate and further investigate the history of the Anunnaki. His travels have taken him to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Egyptian Pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, the temple of Dendera, and the Nemrud Mount. He is an avid fan of all things Mesopotamia.