One of my favorite websites for research is cdli.ucla.edu. It contains thousands of Cuneiform Tablets from museums around the world. Upon looking at the collection at Vorderasiatisches Museum (VAM) in Berlin, I noticed this rather peculiar carving on a tablet. It is dated Late Uruk IV (ca. 3350-3200 BC). My immediate thought when I saw it was, “da plane da plane!” Looks exactly like a modem day jet, except without a tail fin.
So the first argument can be made that it is a fish or a bird. So I looked through all the tablets pertaining to that location and time period, and trust me there are many, to look at the depictions of other animals, specifically fish and birds. One thing I did find is that a representation of a specific animal/object always stays the same. For example, fish never took on varying forms or shapes, but stayed consistent in how they looked.
Back then their images were much like our words today and were used as a form of documentation/communication. Therefore, just like our alphabet stays the same, so did their depictions for animals and objects in the tablets. It was not used for artwork, but strictly for some sort of record keeping or archive.
So that said, I found several depictions of fish and birds, which you can see below. Please feel free to browse the tablets yourself by clicking this link to see if you can find any other variations that I missed (do a edit/find for P000829 to see the image in question). But from what I found, they always appeared the same in every instance and are clearly fish and birds, not aerodynamic aircraft.
Fish
Bird
As for the bird, this was the best one that was available due to the condition of the tablets, so I included their official line drawing (no it is not one of my doodles) so you could see it a little more clearly.
Misc Animals
Here are other animals that can be found, just so you can see the accuracy in which items of this nature were depicted. Although, the cow does remind me of a Disney cartoon character.
MU
The name given to the “aircraft” depiction by the Museum was the Sumerian “MU” (Akkadian “shamu”; Hebrew “shem”). Scholars translate this word and “sky” or “heaven.” But Zecharia Sitchin, the granddaddy of the Ancient Astronaut theory, had another idea all together. He translated this to mean a rocket ship or aircraft of somekind. Now I won’t get into his reasoning here, that is a whole different topic, but I encourage you to read about it in his Book, The 12rh Planet. The discussion starts on page 143 and he gives a very good argument, complete with resources and very convincing examples. But either way, associating such an depiction with what scholars translate as “heavens,” is quite a coincidence. Could it have been something that went into the heavens that this ancient culture was depicting? The only thing I know of that can do that is a modern day aircraft or shuttle.
Conclusion
Given these criteria…
1) The pictogram that represented a specific animal or object remained consistent, much like the letters in our alphabet. There was never any artwork or other miscellaneous images found on the tablets to suggest anything but documentation and a uniform writing system.
2) The translation of MU givin by the Museum represents that it is a documented symbol or pictogram that has been found in other ancient tablets, which is why it was given that specific name. This is not the first and only time MU has been used in ancient Cuneiform.
3) MU was not identified with other depictions of fish or birds.
So unless it is a new species of pointy-finned cyclops birds that went extinct, we may just be looking at a craft of some kind.
I am completely open for discussion on this one. Please let me know if you have any other theories of what it might be.
