The Apkallu

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A potter at Nimrud, in the ninth century before the common era, took a small lump of clay and shaped from it a standing figure with the head of a fish reared over a human head and the fish’s skin falling down the back like a hood. He fired it, and somebody set it in a brick box beneath a floor, where it sat in the dark for the next twenty-seven centuries until a spade turned it up. It was never meant to be seen. It was meant to work — to keep the thing it depicted on station at the threshold of the house, warding the rooms above against whatever the night might bring. The figure had a name and a pedigree that the householder knew well. It was one of the apkallu, the seven sages who had come up out of the sea before the Flood to give the world its arts, and whose protection a buried image was thought to carry into a living room.

That double character — founding teacher of civilization in the great myths, and a clay guardian in a foundation box — belongs to a single conception. The apkallu were the point at which Mesopotamia answered the oldest question a literate culture can ask of itself: where did all of this come from, the writing and the law and the cities and the surveying of fields? The answer it gave was not invention. It was revelation, handed over whole, at the beginning, by beings who did not belong to the dry land.

From the abgal to the apkallu

The word is old and it crosses two languages. In Sumerian the sage is the abgal; in Akkadian the same figure becomes the apkallu, a term whose general sense runs through “wise,” “expert,” “sage.” The plural that the modern study of cuneiform has fixed on is the seven — the Seven Sages, the antediluvian apkallū who stand at the head of every Mesopotamian account of how learning reached humankind.

Their origin is in water, and specifically in the apsû, the sweet freshwater abyss that the Mesopotamian cosmos held to lie beneath the earth and the sea. The apsû was the domain of Enki — Enki to the Sumerians, Ea to the Akkadians — the god of wisdom, of incantation, and of the underground waters that well up in springs and marsh. It was Enki-Ea who made the seven sages in the apsû and sent them up into the human world to teach. They are his emissaries. They surface from the deep, do their work in the light, and return to the water; the element they belong to is not the city they instruct but the abyss under it.

The first and greatest of them was Uanna, whose Sumerian name the scribes parsed as U-an, and who carried also the title Adapa, “the wise.” He is the sage of Eridu, the southern marsh-city that Mesopotamian tradition counted as the very first place on earth, the city where kingship descended from heaven before any other. By one temple hymn all seven of the sages lived at Eridu; in the fuller king-lists each of the oldest cities has its own. Uanna served Alulim, the first king of the first city, and what he brought was not a craft or two but the entire inventory of the settled life. The sages who follow him in the lists carry names built in the same scribal idiom — Uannedugga, Enmedugga, Enmegalamma, Enmebulugga, An-Enlilda, and last of the seven Utuabzu, of whom the texts say something singular: that he alone, when his work was done, was taken up into heaven rather than going back down into the deep.

This is a divine genealogy in the strict sense. The apkallu are not heroes raised to honor and not priests in elaborate dress. They are made beings of part-divine descent, of the apsû, intermediate between the gods and humankind, and their seven-ness is doctrine. Seven sages, seven cities, seven kings before the Flood — a closed and perfect set, sealed off by the deluge that ends the primeval age. Everything that matters about them depends on where in time they are placed, and they are placed at the absolute beginning.

Winged, eagle-headed apkallu from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, holding a cone and a bucket; Neo-Assyrian, c. 865-850 BCE, British Museum. Photo Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The gift handed over whole

What the apkallu gave was civilization itself, and the way they gave it is the heart of the teaching. The clearest surviving portrait comes not from a cuneiform tablet at all but from a Greek book — and the route by which it survives is itself part of the story. Early in the third century BCE a priest of Bel-Marduk at Babylon named Berossus wrote a history of his homeland, the Babyloniaca, in Greek, for the Macedonian king Antiochus I, who ruled an ancient land through temple archives he could not read. Berossus’s book is lost. It survives only as quotation inside quotation — excerpted by Alexander Polyhistor, copied by the Christian chronographers Eusebius and George Syncellus — so that the account reaches the present several hands deep, the original never recoverable behind the copies.

In that account the first sage appears under a Greek name, Oannes, a Hellenized form of Uanna. He rises from the Erythraean Sea into a Babylonia whose people live, until that morning, without order, like beasts. His body is a fish’s; beneath the fish’s head sits a man’s head, and below the tail are a man’s feet; his voice is human and articulate. Through the daylight he stays on land and teaches, taking no food, and at sunset he goes back down into the water, for he is amphibious and passes the night in the deep. The curriculum Berossus records is specific and total: letters and the sciences and arts of every kind; how to found cities and raise temples; how to compile laws; the principles of geometry; how to tell the seeds of the earth apart and gather the fruits — in short, everything that could soften manners and make a human life human.

Then comes the clause the whole conception turns on. From that time, the account says, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions. The version hosted in the Library — Isaac Preston Cory’s Ancient Fragments of 1832, which prints the Polyhistor text — renders it plainly: “From that time, nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions.” The inventory of civilization arrived complete on its first day. Whatever any later sage disclosed was repetition.

This is the doctrine, and it cuts against the grain of how cultures usually tell their own origins. Most foundation stories let the arts accumulate — fire stolen here, a craft invented there, knowledge won by degrees and paid for in suffering. The apkallu refuse the gradient. There is no slow ascent, no painful invention. The full apparatus of the humanized life is present at the start, delivered intact by a being from the abyss, and what follows the gift is not progress but conservation. Knowledge does not grow toward the present in this scheme. It descends from an origin, and is, at best, kept.

The god Ea at the center of a basalt water basin from Assur, flanked by figures in fish cloaks holding purification buckets; Neo-Assyrian, reign of Sennacherib (704-681 BCE), Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Photo Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The seven kings and the line that carried it

The apkallu do not stand alone. They are paired, each sage with a king, across the dynasty of rulers who governed before the Flood. The pairing is laid out most starkly in the Uruk List of Kings and Sages, a tablet written in 165 or 164 BCE and dug up in 1959 and 1960 from the temple of Anu in the Bit Res precinct at Uruk. The list sets seven antediluvian kings beside the seven sages who advised them, then records the Deluge, and only after the great break turns to a further run of king-and-scholar pairs. The flood is the hinge of the whole document. It divides the world that was before from the world that came after.

What changes across that hinge is the nature of the wise man. Before the Flood, the sages are the apkallu, beings of the apsû, half-divine. After it, the line continues — but the figures who carry it are human. The post-flood scholars are the ummânu, the learned experts, and the texts are careful to mark them with the different word. The ummânu are the royal scholars of historical Mesopotamia: the men who advised the kings of Assyria and Babylon on the reading of omens, the diagnosis of illness, the movements of the stars, the correct words of an incantation. They are the literate professional class that actually existed, sitting in the archives, copying the tablets. And they claimed, by way of these lists, to be the direct heirs of the antediluvian sages — the human end of an unbroken chain whose first link was a fish-creature sent up by Ea before the catastrophe.

This is the social work the construction does, and it is precise. By projecting their own crafts back onto a primeval generation of half-fish revealers, and then drawing a continuous line of transmission down to themselves, the scribal guilds of the first millennium gave their learning a pedigree older than kingship and older than the Flood. Their authority was not that they had worked something out. It was that they held, intact, a wisdom that had been complete before history began. The boundary in the list — apkallu above, ummânu below, the Deluge between — is exactly where the chain of initiates is forged.

The lists are also where the seven acquire their full register of names, and where the variants multiply. Berossus, working the same tradition into Greek, scattered the single tutelary visitation into a dynasty of emissaries — figures his copyists call Annedotus and Musarus and Odacon, each rising from the same sea across the antediluvian reigns to renew the teaching. The figure is one in its logic, one alien teacher and one complete gift, and plural in its transmission, multiplying the longer the chain of copyists runs. Among the human Adapa there is a further thread the texts hold open: Adapa, the sage of Eridu whom Ea perfected with great intelligence, is in one famous myth offered the bread and water of immortal life in heaven and, following Ea’s counsel, refuses them — and so forfeits deathlessness, for himself and for humankind. How tightly Uanna-Adapa names one being or pairs two has been argued since the identification was first drawn from the cuneiform. What is not in doubt is that the sea-creature of Berossus and the sage of Eridu are one tradition wearing two scripts.

The guardians in the foundations

The apkallu were never only a story about the past. They were a working term in the ritual vocabulary of Mesopotamia, summoned in image and incantation to do a present job. The Assyriologist F. A. M. Wiggermann, in his study of the protective-spirit ritual texts, established that the fish-garbed figures of Mesopotamian apotropaic art are not priests dressed up for a rite but the mythological sages themselves — the apkallu of the apsû, called into clay and relief to ward a place as they had once warded the antediluvian cities.

The iconography runs to more than one type. There is the fish-cloaked apkallu, a man wrapped in the skin of the great carp, the fish’s head forming a hood over his own and its body hanging down his back, corresponding directly to the Oannes that Berossus described. There is the winged, bird-headed apkallu, eagle-faced, that dominates the relief programs of the Neo-Assyrian palaces, striding along the walls with a cone and a bucket. The ritual instruction known from the incantation series Bit Meseri — “the protected house” — prescribed the making of these figures in sets of seven and the burying of them at appointed points of a building: at the head of the bed, in the foundation, at the threshold of the room. Buried, they were on guard. The little fired figure under the floor at Nimrud is one such guardian, sealed in its box to hold the line against evil exactly as the seven sages had held the line for the first cities of the world.

A clay apkallu figurine — a fish-cloaked sage of the type buried in a foundation box to guard a house against evil; Assyria, from Nimrud or Nineveh. Photo Zunkir, CC BY-SA 4.0.

That the same beings should be both the founding teachers of the high arts and the unseen wardens of a private floor is not a contradiction within the frame. The wisdom the apkallu carried was protective by nature. To know the right name, the right ordering, the right word, was to be able to hold off the disorder the world tends toward. The sage who taught a city its laws and the figure that guarded a house against the dark were the same kind of thing, doing the same work at two scales.

The headwater of a long dream

The shape of the apkallu — a knowledge older than history, received complete from a divine or half-divine sage, and carried down through a chain of named initiates to the scholars of the present — would prove to be one of the most durable forms the ancient world produced. It is the underlying figure of what the later Western tradition would call the prisca theologia, the “ancient theology”: the conviction that a single, original, perfect wisdom was given near the beginning of things and transmitted, hand to hand, down a lineage of sages.

When that idea took its classic shape in the Renaissance, the chain of its bearers was drawn in different names — but the form is the apkallu’s. It gathered around Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian priest imagined to hold a wisdom older than the Greeks; around Enoch, the patriarch taken up to heaven with the secrets of the heavens; around Zoroaster and the Chaldeans, the star-reading sages whose name the later tradition made a byword for the oldest learning of all. The resemblance is one of structure, not of proven descent: a primordial revelation, a divine or near-divine first teacher, a sealed antediluvian completeness, and a transmitted lineage are the recurring bones of the thing across cultures that did not always borrow from one another. But the Mesopotamian version is the earliest of them to survive in full, and it sits squarely behind the Hellenistic and later constructions — Berossus, who first put the fish-sage into Greek, was read for exactly this, as a witness to a learning far older than the classical past.

The recovery of the apkallu themselves is a modern event. Through long centuries Mesopotamia was a memory carried only secondhand, in the Greek fragments of Berossus and the notices of late chroniclers — Oannes the fish-man preserved in a quotation of a quotation, his cuneiform substrate entirely forgotten. The seven sages, with their Sumerian names and their pairing with the kings and their figurines in the foundation boxes, came back into view only when the wedge-shaped script was deciphered in the nineteenth century and the tablets and the buried clay began to be read and dug. The Uruk List was lifted from the temple of Anu in 1959 and 1960; the apotropaic figures were studied as a working ritual system only in the late twentieth century. The half-divine teachers who, in the frame of their own world, had given humankind the whole of its learning had to be returned to memory by the slow labor of the very scholars who were, in a sense, their last ummânu — the literate inheritors, reading back across the Flood to the beings at the origin of the line.

→ In the library: Cory — Ancient Fragments (1832)

→ Related: Oannes · Berossus · Enki · Eridu · Prisca Theologia · Hermes Trismegistus · Chaldeans · Sin · Tiamat · Ereshkigal · The Sumerians · The Assyrians · The Elamites · Ur · Nineveh · Etemenanki · Marduk · Nabu · Gilgamesh · Anu · Ishtar · Babylon · Sabians Of Harran · Ostanes