ME - The Divine Decrees

The ME (Sumerian: ME, plural MEŠ) were the divine decrees or principles of civilization in Sumerian mythology. In Zecharia Sitchin’s interpretation, the ME were a collection of knowledge, technology, and cultural templates - essentially a “civilization package” that the Anunnaki transmitted to humanity.

The Physical Hook

The Sumerians wrote down over 100 distinct ME - the complete blueprint of civilization. Every craft. Every law. Every ritual. And they said the ME came from the gods.

Not from trial and error. Not from generations of cultural evolution. The Sumerians were explicit: the ME were handed down by beings who already possessed advanced civilization. The clay tablets don’t use metaphors. They use the verb šu-ti - “to receive from the hand of.”

The Sumerians didn’t invent civilization. They were given the operating manual. And they wrote down every line of it on clay.

The Word Game: ME as a Database

Here is what mainstream academics won’t tell you. The Sumerian word ME doesn’t just mean “decree” or “principle.” It also carries the connotation of “being” and “essence” - the fundamental nature of a thing.

Compare this to modern data storage. A USB drive doesn’t “contain” your files in any physical sense. It contains magnetic patterns - code - that, when read by the right device, becomes your documents, images, and software. The code is the thing.

That is exactly how the ME worked. They were not physical objects. They were encoded knowledge - templates that, when installed into a society, produced kingship, law, metalworking, music, and writing. The ME were the source code of civilization.

Think of DNA. Four base pairs. Three billion combinations. Every human, every elephant, every blade of grass - all encoded in the same chemical alphabet. The ME functioned the same way. Over 100 modules. Infinite combinations. One complete civilization.

The Sumerians had the concept of a civilization database 5,000 years before Alan Turing was born. They just didn’t call it software. They called it the ME.

The ME in Sumerian Texts

The ME are described as:

The fundamental principles of civilization
The powers and offices of gods and humans
The skills and crafts of culture
The sacred rituals and offices
The knowledge of the universe

According to the text “Inanna and Enki: The Transfer of the ME,” there were over 100 distinct ME, including:

Lordship, divinity, kingship
The shepherd’s staff and royal scepter
The art of music and song
Carpentry, metalworking, and writing
Truth, justice, and wisdom
Sexual intercourse and prostitution
The holy purification rituals

The complete list of ME, preserved across multiple Sumerian tablets, reads like the curriculum of a technical university: mathematics, astronomy, medicine, law, architecture, irrigation engineering, and survey techniques. These are not the concerns of Neolithic farmers. These are the disciplines of an advanced, organized civilization - one that appeared fully formed in Mesopotamia around 3800 B.C.

The mainstream timeline cannot explain this. The Sumerians went from mud huts to ziggurats, from tally sticks to complex mathematics, from tribal elders to codified law - in less than 500 years. No culture in history has developed that fast. Unless they didn’t develop it at all. Unless they were given the ME.

The Great Heist: Inanna Steals Civilization’s Source Code

The most famous story involving the ME is Inanna’s acquisition of them from Enki:

Inanna visits Enki in Eridu
Enki, drunk, offers her the ME
Inanna takes the ME and loads them onto her “boat” (a spaceship, in Sitchin’s reading)
Enki sobers up and realizes what he has done
He sends monsters to retrieve the ME, but Inanna escapes
Inanna brings the ME to Uruk, establishing civilization there

The mainstream reads this as myth - a charming story about a goddess who got her grandfather drunk and walked off with the blueprints for civilization.

Sitchin reads it differently. And his reading explains the details the mainstream cannot.

First: the “boat” (má in Sumerian). Inanna loads the ME onto the Boat of Heaven and sails away while Enki’s monsters chase her. But Inanna doesn’t sail on water. She sails from Eridu to Uruk - cities connected by the Euphrates River, yes. But the text describes her crossing mountains and bypassing cities in ways that make no sense for a river voyage. Sitchin identifies the Boat of Heaven as a flying craft - and the ME as physical data modules loaded onto it.

Second: Enki doesn’t just “wake up sober” the next morning. The text describes a lengthy process during which Enki’s vizier, Isimud, reports the theft. Enki sends six waves of monsters after her - sea monsters, mountain demons, water creatures - and Inanna defeats each one. This is not a hangover. This is a military pursuit across contested territory.

Third: the prize. The Sumerians didn’t write 4,000 lines of poetry about someone stealing a philosophy. Whatever the ME were, they were worth going to war over. Over 100 distinct modules. The complete operating system of civilization. Inanna didn’t steal ideas. She stole an Anunnaki hard drive.

Here is where the story gets uncomfortable for mainstream academia. After Inanna brings the ME to Uruk, the city explodes. It becomes the largest, most advanced city in Sumer - the cradle of written law, monumental architecture, and organized religion. The transfer of the ME correlates exactly with the rise of Uruk as a world power.

Coincidence? The Sumerians didn’t think so. They wrote it all down on clay.

Sitchin’s Interpretation

“The ME were not abstract principles. They were the knowledge templates and technologies of the Anunnaki - the complete package of civilization that they transmitted to humanity.”

Sitchin saw the ME as:

Scientific Knowledge - Astronomy, mathematics, medicine
Technology - Construction methods, metalworking, agriculture
Social Organization - Kingship, law, priesthood, crafts
Cultural Practices - Music, art, ritual, writing
The Blueprint of Civilization - Everything needed to create a functioning society

In The 12th Planet, Sitchin goes further. He identifies the ME as the mechanism by which the Anunnaki controlled which human cities would rise and which would fall.

This was not philosophy. This was geopolitics. The transfer of the ME from Enki’s city (Eridu) to Inanna’s city (Uruk) was a realignment of power - a coup at the highest level of Anunnaki politics.

In The Cosmic Code, Sitchin refines his interpretation with a striking modern analogy.

Sitchin counted more than 100 ME in the original texts. He grouped them into categories that map directly to fields of modern knowledge:

Category	ME Modules	Modern Equivalent
Governance	Kingship, lordship, the scepter, the crown	Political science, constitutional law
Technology	Metalworking, carpentry, leatherworking, masonry	Engineering, materials science
Knowledge	Writing, mathematics, astronomy, medicine	STEM education
Culture	Music, song, the arts, ritual performance	Humanities and fine arts
Social Order	Truth, justice, wisdom, the holy purification rites	Ethics, law, religion

The pattern is undeniable. Every discipline required to build and maintain a civilization was encoded in the ME. The Sumerians didn’t discover these things one by one. They received the full package.

The ME as “Divine DNA”

Sitchin further argued that the ME were analogous to DNA - they contained the “code” for civilization, just as DNA contains the code for life. The Cosmic Code was the idea that this same pattern of encoded knowledge appears throughout ancient texts.

DNA stores biological information in a chemical alphabet of four letters: A, T, C, G. The ME stored civilizational information in a conceptual alphabet of over 100 modules. Both are information storage systems. Both encode complexity in simple components. Both require a “reader” - a cell’s ribosome or a society’s institutions - to translate code into reality.

The parallel is too precise to be coincidence. Sitchin argued that the Anunnaki, as genetic engineers who designed humanity (see genetic-creation-of-humans), worked with both types of code: biological DNA for the human body, and the ME for human society. One code created the hardware. The other installed the software.

The Tablet of Destinies - The ME’s Hardware

The Tablet of Destinies (DUB.NAM.TAR.RA in Sumerian) is the companion artifact to the ME. Where the ME were the software - the knowledge modules - the Tablet of Destinies was the hardware: a physical object that conferred legal authority.

In the Enuma Elish, the Tablet of Destinies is described as a physical object worn around the neck. Whoever possessed it could alter fate itself. The god Kingu wore it into battle. Marduk seized it after victory. Power transferred with the tablet.

Sitchin’s reading connects the two: the ME were the data, the Tablet of Destinies was the access key. Together, they formed a complete system - knowledge plus authority. You needed both to rule. Inanna stole the ME (the data), but the Tablet of Destinies (the hardware) remained contested in the wars between Anunnaki factions.

The modern parallel: you can have every file in the Pentagon, but without the security clearance (the access key), the data is useless. The Sumerians understood this distinction 5,000 years ago.

The Memex Parallel: 5,000 Years Ahead of Its Time

In 1945, Vannevar Bush - director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development - published a landmark essay titled “As We May Think.” In it, he proposed a device called the Memex: a desk-sized machine that would store all of human knowledge, indexed and cross-referenced, instantly accessible.

Bush described it as “an enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory” - a device that could store books, records, and communications and retrieve them with “exceeding speed and flexibility.”

The Sumerians had the same idea. They just called it the ME.

The ME were a Memex in concept: a complete knowledge repository, organized into modules, containing everything a civilization needed. The difference is that the Memex was theoretical in 1945. The ME were operational in 3800 B.C.

Mainstream scholars will tell you the Sumerians were primitive farmers who gradually developed writing to track grain inventories. But their own texts tell a different story. They say the ME - the complete package of civilization - arrived fully formed. Writing, mathematics, law, astronomy, and kingship all appeared together, not one at a time.

The archaeological record confirms this. The Uruk period (c. 4000-3100 B.C.) saw the simultaneous emergence of writing, monumental architecture, cylinder seals, mass-produced pottery, and complex administrative systems - all within a few centuries. This is not evolution. This is installation.

Cuneiform Evidence

The ME are described in the Sumerian text “Enki and the World Order” (ETCSL 1.1.3), which lists over 100 divine decrees governing civilization. The tablet, from Nippur (Old Babylonian period, c. 1800 BCE), describes Enki organizing the world and distributing the ME to various city-states. Search CDLI for more ME-related tablets.

The primary source for the transfer of the ME is the myth “Inanna and Enki” (ETCSL 1.3.1), preserved on tablets from Nippur and Ur. This text explicitly lists the ME that Inanna received from a drunken Enki - over 100 items spanning every domain of civilized life. Search CDLI for Inanna and Enki tablets.

Sitchin Analysis

Where Sitchin Agrees with Mainstream

The ME existed as a documented concept: Both Sitchin and mainstream Assyriology acknowledge that the ME appear in multiple Sumerian texts, including “Inanna and Enki” and “Enki and the World Order.” Over 100 distinct ME are catalogued in the cuneiform record. This is not disputed.
The ME governed all aspects of civilization: Mainstream scholars agree that the ME covered kingship, crafts, rituals, arts, and social institutions. They were a comprehensive catalog of civilizational functions. The Sumerians themselves categorized them this way.
The transfer of the ME corresponded to political power shifts: The myth of Inanna acquiring the ME from Enki reflects a historical reality - the shift of religious and political power from Eridu (Enki’s city) to Uruk (Inanna’s city). Archaeology confirms Uruk’s rise to dominance during this period.
The ME were considered non-physical but real: Sumerologists agree the ME were not physical objects in the ordinary sense. They were conceptual entities - powers or principles. This aligns with Sitchin’s view that the ME were encoded knowledge, not literal objects.
The Sumerians attributed the ME to divine origin: Mainstream scholarship confirms that the Sumerians believed the ME came from the gods, not from human invention. The texts are unambiguous on this point.

Where They Differ

Nature of the knowledge: Sitchin identifies the ME as concrete knowledge modules - like software programs or databases - containing precise technical information. Mainstream scholarship treats them as abstract cultural concepts and divine attributes. The gap here is the difference between a library and a philosophy.
Origin of the ME: Sitchin says the ME were brought to Earth by the Anunnaki - extraterrestrial beings who encoded their advanced knowledge into transferable modules. Mainstream scholars see the ME as a theological construct developed by Sumerian priests to explain social order.
The “Boat of Heaven” as spacecraft: Sitchin reads Inanna’s “Boat of Heaven” (má-an-na) as a flying vehicle - an aircraft or spacecraft used to transport the ME from Eridu to Uruk. Mainstream scholars read it as a ceremonial river barge, symbolic of the goddess’s journey. The text’s descriptions of the boat’s speed and trajectory, however, are inconsistent with river travel.
The ME as technology transfer: Sitchin argues that the sudden appearance of advanced civilization in Sumer around 3800 B.C. - writing, mathematics, astronomy, monumental architecture - is evidence that the ME were installed, not developed. Mainstream archaeology attributes this to gradual cultural evolution, though it cannot explain why it happened only in Sumer and not elsewhere.
Number and specificity: Sitchin emphasizes that the ME numbered over 100 and covered precise domains (metalworking, mathematics, medicine). Mainstream scholars acknowledge the count but treat the list as ritual enumeration rather than a catalog of actual knowledge modules.
The Inanna-Enki narrative as historical event: Sitchin reads the myth as a record of an actual political and military operation - the theft of data modules from one Anunnaki faction by another. Mainstream scholarship reads it as allegorical poetry about the transfer of religious authority.

PRO vs CONTRA

Argument PRO (Sitchin)	Counterargument (mainstream)
Over 100 ME catalogued in Sumerian texts - a complete civilization blueprint	The list is ritual enumeration, not a technical catalog
Sumerian civilization emerged fully formed in ~500 years - impossible without external input	Gradual development in the preceding Ubaid period explains the transition
The ME covered STEM fields (math, astronomy, medicine) - not just religious concepts	Sumerian astronomy and math developed over centuries; early forms were rudimentary
Inanna’s “Boat of Heaven” described with flight-like characteristics	The Boat of Heaven is standard mythological imagery for divine journeys
Uruk’s explosive growth correlates exactly with Inanna’s acquisition of the ME	Correlation is not causation; Uruk’s rise had economic and geographic causes
The ME as “knowledge modules” matches modern database/DNA encoding concepts	This is an anachronistic projection - applying modern concepts to ancient texts
Transfer of ME from Enki to Inanna = real political power shift between Anunnaki factions	The myth reflects human political shifts between city-states, not alien politics
The Sumerians explicitly said the ME came from the gods, not human development	All ancient cultures attributed knowledge to divine sources - this is not unique
ME + Tablet of Destinies = software + hardware - a complete knowledge system	The Tablet of Destinies is a separate mythological artifact; the connection is Sitchin’s invention
Vannevar Bush’s Memex (1945) is the same concept - a knowledge repository - 5,000 years later	Superficial analogy; many cultures had catalog systems (e.g., Library of Alexandria)

Sources

Sitchin, Z. (1976). The 12th Planet. Chapter 8: “Kingship of Heaven.”
Sitchin, Z. (1998). The Cosmic Code. Chapter 5: “The Celestial Encyclopedia.”
Sitchin, Z. (1980). The Stairway to Heaven. Chapters on the ME and Inanna’s journey.
Wolkstein, D. & Kramer, S. N. (1983). Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth.
Farber-Flügge, G. (1973). Der Mythos ‘Inanna und Enki’.
Kramer, S. N. (1963). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character.
ETCSL 1.1.3 - “Enki and the World Order” (translation).
ETCSL 1.3.1 - “Inanna and Enki” (translation).
Bush, V. (1945). “As We May Think.” The Atlantic Monthly.

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