Person
Zecharia Sitchin
Author of The 12th Planet (1976). He read the Anunnaki as extraterrestrials from a twelfth planet who made humans to mine gold.
Natritmeyer, “Tablet of Shamash”, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
That reading is a modern interpretation. It is not what the Sumerian line says, and it is not the account attributed to Bashar. Specialists in the ancient languages do not accept his translations. His second book, The Stairway to Heaven (1980), is also the origin of the claim that the Khufu marks inside the Great Pyramid were forged in 1837, a claim later readers, Grant among them, repeat.