Enki

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At Eridu, in the marshland where the Euphrates loses itself among the reeds and the salt of the Gulf meets the river’s sweet water, the spade of the excavator went down through a single sacred plot and counted eighteen temples stacked one upon another, the earliest a one-room shrine of the sixth millennium, the latest a platform begun under the kings of the third. Every one of them belonged to the same lord. The Sumerians held that Eridu was the first of all cities, the first place where kingship came down from heaven, and the god who kept his house there was Enki — the Akkadians later called him Ea — master of the freshwater that runs beneath the dry world and of everything those waters were thought to carry: wisdom, craft, magic, and a cunning that could bend a rule without quite breaking it.

The lord of the abzu

Beneath the earth, in the Mesopotamian picture of things, lay the abzu — apsu in Akkadian — a vast body of sweet water on which the flat disk of the land was imagined to float, the source of springs and wells and of the rivers that made Sumer habitable. This was Enki’s element and his estate. His temple at Eridu bore the name E-abzu, the House of the Abzu, and was also called the E-engura, the House of Sweet Waters; the freshwater abyss was not merely his neighborhood but his throne room. On the cylinder seals he is shown with two streams pouring from his shoulders, fish swimming up the current against the flow, and behind him stands his two-faced vizier Isimud, who looks at once forward and back.

The Adda seal (Akkadian, c. 2300 BCE), British Museum. Ea stands at right with fish-filled streams at his shoulders. Photo: Nic McPhee, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

His parentage placed him near the summit of the pantheon. He was a son of An, the sky — Anu in Akkadian — the most ancient and most remote of the gods; in the tradition that belonged to Eridu his mother was Nammu, the primeval sea, the watery deep that bore heaven and earth before there were other gods to bear. By the time of the great theological systems of the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, Enki stood as one of a ruling triad: An over the heavens, the storm-god Enlil over the air and the inhabited earth from his seat at Nippur, and Enki over the waters below. The three divided the cosmos, and the division was never wholly peaceable. Enlil commanded; Enki, his brother and his rival, found the way around the command. Where Enlil’s instrument was the storm and the flood, Enki’s was the word — the incantation, the plan, the loophole.

The name itself resists a settled reading. Enki is usually rendered “Lord of the Earth,” though the element does not sit easily with a water-god, and some scholars have preferred “Lord of Benevolence,” which better fits the figure the myths actually draw. Ea, the Akkadian name, may carry a Semitic root for life. Among his many epithets one stuck: Nudimmud, “the one who fashions,” the maker. His sacred number was forty, and one of his emblems was the goat-fish, the creature with the forequarters of a goat and the tail of a carp that would much later lend its shape to the constellation Capricorn.

The one whose hands made mankind

Why there should be human beings at all is a question the Mesopotamian texts answer without sentiment, and Enki stands at the center of the answer. In the Old Babylonian poem Atrahasis, composed in the early second millennium and preserved on tablets a scribe named Ku-Aya copied out, the world begins with the gods themselves doing the labor — digging the rivers, hauling the baskets of earth, keeping the canals. The lesser gods, worn down by the work, break into revolt, surround Enlil’s house by night, and burn their tools. Into the deadlock comes Enki with a proposal. Let the mother-goddess — Mami, Nintu, Belet-ili, she goes by several names — fashion a creature to carry the load. A god is slain so that his flesh and blood may be mixed into the clay, and from that clay, tempered over the abzu, the first humans are made, to bear the yoke the gods have laid down.

The Sumerian poem Enki and Ninmah tells a cousin of the story and gives it a sharper edge. Roused from his bed in the deep by Nammu, Enki devises the plan to pinch humankind from clay; then, at a banquet, he and the birth-goddess Ninmah fall to a contest, she shaping deformed and broken creatures to see whether Enki can find each one a place in the world, and he answering every flawed body with an office, a livelihood, a use. It is a creation myth that is also a meditation on craft — on the god who does not refuse the misshapen thing but assigns it a function. The later incantation series Šurpu names him simply as the god “whose hands created mankind.” He did not merely consent to humanity. He designed it, and he was thereafter answerable for it.

The keeper of the me

If the world was to hold together once it was made, it needed more than people. It needed the me — a word that has no clean English equivalent, pointing at once to the divine decrees, powers, and offices that underlie an ordered civilization: kingship and priesthood, the crafts of the metalworker and the scribe and the leather-cutter, the rites of the temple, music, judgment, even the darker givens of falsehood and strife. More than a hundred of them were reckoned, and they were Enki’s to keep, stored in his house at Eridu where the foundations of culture were thought to be guarded.

The myth Inanna and Enki tells how they were carried off. The goddess Inanna comes to Eridu from Uruk; Enki receives her with a banquet, and the drinking runs high. Cup after cup, in his generosity or his vanity, he hands her the me — kingship, the priestly offices, the arts of the city, dozens upon dozens of them — and Inanna loads them onto the Boat of Heaven and slips away downriver. Sobered, Enki sends his vizier and the monsters of the abzu to seize them back, six times over, and six times Inanna’s minister beats them off, until the me come safe to Uruk and the gifts of civilization pass from the first city to the rising one. Scholars have long read the tale as the mythic memory of a real shift of primacy from old Eridu to younger Uruk. Inside the frame, it is something stranger: the god of wisdom outwitted, for once, at his own table, and the foundations of culture changing hands over wine.

The god who knew the words

Of all his offices the most enduring was this — Enki was the patron of the ashipu, the exorcist-priest, and the ultimate source of every incantation spoken against sickness, against the demon, against the evil that came in the night. The texts give the mechanism a fixed shape. The afflicted person’s trouble rises to Enki’s son Asalluhi, who comes to his father in the abzu and reports what he has seen; Enki answers, “My son, what do you not know? What more could I add to it?” — and then tells him the remedy, the word to speak, the rite to perform. The formula is itself a teaching: the god of wisdom already knows everything, and the cure descends from him through the divine craftsman to the human practitioner. To pronounce an incantation correctly was to draw, at the last remove, on the knowledge of Eridu. The diviners who read the future in the liver of a sheep, the baru, looked to him as well. He was the deep that knew, and the priest who healed borrowed his authority.

Ea with a fish-cloaked apkallu, basalt water basin from Assur, reign of Sennacherib, 7th century BCE. Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Out of this office grew one of the tradition’s most haunting figures. Before the flood, it was held, Enki sent up from the abzu the apkallu, the seven sages, half-fish and half-man, who came out of the sea by day to teach the first cities writing and law and the building of temples and the working of the land, and returned to the water by night. The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in Greek in the third century BCE, called the first of them Oannes and described him as a creature “with the form of a fish but with the head of a man under the fish’s head,” who gave humankind every art and added nothing afterward, for he had given everything at once. These were Enki’s emissaries, the channel by which the wisdom of the deep reached the dry land — and they are why, on later Assyrian reliefs, the god of healing keeps the company of men dressed in the skins of fish.

The warning to the reed wall

The flood is the place where Enki’s cunning shows most plainly, and shows at its finest, because it is exercised against the will of the assembled gods and on humanity’s behalf. In Atrahasis the story turns grim before it turns merciful. The people Enki has made multiply and grow loud, and their noise so disturbs Enlil that he sends plague, then drought, then famine to thin them — and each time Enki teaches his protégé Atrahasis how to turn the affliction aside. At last Enlil resolves on the flood, the final solution, and binds the gods by oath to keep the secret, Enki among them. He has sworn. He cannot tell the man.

So he does not tell the man. He tells the wall. Standing outside Atrahasis’s house, Enki speaks not to his servant but to the reed wall of the hut behind which the servant is listening — “Wall, listen to me! Reed wall, pay attention to all my words! Tear down the house, build a boat, abandon possessions and seek life, spurn property and save what lives.” The oath is kept to its letter and broken in its substance. The man overhears, builds the vessel, loads it with his kin and the seed of living things, and rides out the seven days and nights of the deluge while the rest of humankind perishes. When the flood subsides and the gods, who have gone hungry without their offerings, gather like flies over the survivor’s sacrifice, it is Enki who faces down Enlil’s fury and argues that the punishment was unjust and disproportionate — that the noise might have been answered with less than annihilation. The figure that emerges is the trickster as advocate: the god who keeps his word and saves the world in the same breath, and then defends what he has saved.

These were the words that, in the version embedded in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Assyriologist George Smith read aloud at the British Museum on the third of December, 1872, before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, with the prime minister Gladstone among his listeners — a Babylonian flood, older than scripture, surfacing out of a broken tablet from the ruins of Nineveh. The resemblance to the deluge of Genesis was immediate and undeniable, and the question of how the two accounts stand to one another — shared inheritance, common Near Eastern memory, direct dependence — has been argued ever since without a closing verdict. The kinship is plain; its mechanism is not.

Babylon and the eclipse of Ea

The afterlife of a god in Mesopotamia was bound to the fortunes of his city, and as Babylon rose, the lord of Eridu was quietly overtaken by his own son. Enki’s firstborn was Marduk, the city-god of Babylon, and in the great creation poem Enuma Elish the work of the father becomes the prologue to the glory of the son.

Statue of the god Ea holding a cup, from Nasiriyah, Iraq, 2004–1595 BCE. Iraq Museum. Photo: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The poem opens before the world, when only Tiamat, the salt sea, and Apsu, the freshwater deep, had mingled their waters. The younger gods are born, and their clamor wearies Apsu, who plots to destroy them. Here Ea acts as he always acts — not with the storm but with the spell. He recites an incantation over Apsu, casts him into sleep, kills him, and binds his vizier Mummu; then he builds his own dwelling upon the slain body of the deep, names it the Apsu, and there, “inside pure Apsu, Marduk was born,” begotten of Ea and his consort Damkina. The shape of the theology is exact. The god of wisdom subdues the primeval water by craft and makes its corpse his home — and in that home is born the storm-champion who will go out to face Tiamat herself, split her body into heaven and earth, and take the kingship of the gods. Ea, who could outwit Apsu, hands the cosmos to a son who can defeat the sea in open war. The creation of humankind, which in the older poems was Enki’s own, is in Enuma Elish the joint work of Ea and Marduk, with the rebel god Qingu supplying the blood. The maker becomes the maker’s father.

Yet he was never displaced, only outshone. Ea kept his ancient office as the god of wisdom and incantation and remained, to the end of cuneiform culture, the patron of the scribes and the sages, the deep from which knowledge came. In Babylon and Assyria his name stood at the head of every healing rite; the fish-cloaked apkallu went on guarding the thresholds of palaces and temples into the seventh century and beyond. When the Sumerians themselves had been forgotten — recovered only in the nineteenth century, a whole people read back out of the clay after two thousand years of silence — it was Ea, under his Akkadian name, who carried their water-wisdom forward into the libraries of Nineveh and the chronicles of the Chaldean priests.

The modern reception has been less measured. Enki has proved irresistible to the literature of the marginal — recruited as humanity’s secret friend against a tyrant pantheon, read as a benevolent engineer of the species, pressed into service by the ancient-astronaut writers who saw in the clay-and-blood of Atrahasis a record of something other than myth. Much of this rests on the genuine grain of the texts: he is, within the tradition, the god who takes humanity’s side, who makes the people and then will not see them drowned, who keeps an oath and breaks a death sentence in the same sentence. The accretions are another matter. What remains under them, on the seals and in the incantations and in the eighteen layered temples of Eridu, is older and stranger than any of its modern uses — a lord of the sweet water beneath the world, who knew the words, and used them to bend the verdict of heaven.

→ Related: Eridu · The Apkallu · The Sumerians · Tiamat · Ereshkigal · Sin · Marduk · Oannes · Berossus · Ishtar · Anu · Nippur · Uruk · Babylon · Gilgamesh · Sumer · Chaldeans · Prisca Theologia