The Igigi

The Igigi are the labor caste of the Sumerian-Babylonian heavens: junior gods subordinate to the ruling Anunnaki, sparsely described in the surviving texts. Their defining act is a strike. In the ancient-astronaut retelling they are humanoid workers of lower rank, and in Zecharia Sitchin's framework specifically, junior astronauts stationed on Mars while the senior Anunnaki mined gold on Earth.

The textual source is the Old Babylonian Atrahasis Epic (around 1650 BCE): the lesser gods who dig the rivers and bear the workload rebel against their toil, and the senior gods' solution is to create humanity as replacement labor, transferring the burden from gods to people. The Igigi also appear as a subordinate divine class in the Enuma Elish. Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976) and Genesis Revisited (1990) absorbed them into his Nibiru narrative as the mid-tier caste whose mutiny forced the Anunnaki to engineer Homo sapiens.

None; the Igigi are textual beings, active in the lore only through interpretation.

The strike-that-created-humanity story gives the ancient-astronaut genre its most quotable labor-history beat, and the Igigi circulate wherever the Anunnaki do, from Ancient Aliens to internet mythography.

Assyriologists read Atrahasis as theology: a meditation on why humans exist to serve the gods, within a coherent Mesopotamian worldview, with "Igigi" and "Anunnaki" as divine classes whose meanings shift across periods and texts. Sitchin's Mars posting and mining framework have no textual basis, per the standard critiques. The strike is real literature; the astronauts are modern authorship.