Belet-ili

The clay is already wet when she is sent for. Enki has trodden it himself, down in the dark of the house, and the gods who have just laid down their tools are waiting to see what the midwife will make of it. She pinches off fourteen pieces and sets seven on her right and seven on her left, with a single mud brick between them. All the while she recites an incantation, and Enki sits facing her and prompts her when she falters. Then she waits ten months.

This is the scene at the centre of the Old Babylonian epic of Atrahasis, copied out in the seventeenth century BCE by a scribe who signed his tablets, and the goddess at the centre of it goes by several names in the space of a few lines. She is Mami, a nursery word, close to what a child calls its mother. She is Nintu, the Sumerian birth goddess, carried over into an Akkadian poem. And she is Belet-ili, the Mistress of the Gods, which is a title rather than a name and is the one that lasted. Babylonian scholars treated her as the same great mother the Sumerians had called Ninhursag and Ninmah. The stories told about her in Akkadian, though, are her own, and they are harder and sadder than the Sumerian ones.

Nobody says where she came from. The texts give her no parents and no birth. She is simply there when she is needed, the sister of the great gods and their wise counsellor, and at different times Anu, Enlil and Enki are each named as her husband. What she looks like is just as elusive. The poems show her dressing for work, covering her head and tying on her belt before a delivery, and they mention a voice that is sweet. They give her no features at all. The image that stands for her on Kassite boundary stones is a sign shaped like the Greek letter omega, which is usually taken for a womb.

The work she is called to do begins with a strike. The junior gods, the Igigi, have dug the rivers and canals for longer than they can bear, and one night they burn their spades and surround Enlil’s house. Enki offers the way out: let the womb-goddess make a creature to carry the load. Mami’s answer is short. It is not hers to do alone, she says; the work is Enki’s, and if he gives her the clay she will do it. So a god is chosen and killed in the assembly, a god named in the text as one who had intelligence, and she mixes his flesh and blood into the clay. The gods spit on it. A drumbeat is heard that will never stop, the pulse in every human body from that day on. When she has finished she tells them plainly what she has done. She has taken the yoke off them and put it on man. They run to kiss her feet, and they tell her that they used to call her Mami, but from now on she will be Mistress of All the Gods.

A birth in a Babylonian house followed her pattern. When the tenth month comes she slips in a staff and opens the womb, her face bright, and she draws a circle of flour on the floor and lays the brick down. The rule she gives is that the brick stays in place in the house of a woman who has given birth, so that the birth goddess is honoured there. Women in labour crouched on bricks. The goddess had put the first one down herself.

Then the people multiply, and their noise keeps Enlil awake, and after plague and famine fail he sends the Flood. She had agreed to it in the assembly. This is the part of her story that the poets could not leave alone. In Atrahasis she watches and weeps, her lips crusted dry with thirst, longing for beer that no one is alive to pour, and she asks how she could have spoken for destruction alongside the others. Her children, she says, are clogging the river like dragonflies. In the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic the same goddess cries out like a woman in labour: the old days have turned to clay because she spoke evil among the gods, and the people she bore now fill the sea like fish. She had made them and she had voted to drown them.

When the water falls and the survivor burns his offering, the gods smell it and crowd around like flies. She arrives last. She lifts the great flies of lapis lazuli that Anu once made for her, cold blue stones on a cord, and swears that they will hang at her throat so that she never forgets these days. And she says that Enlil, who did this without thinking, should not come near the incense.

She has one more appearance, in the Standard Babylonian epic of Anzu, and there she is no mourner. The storm-bird Anzu has stolen the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil while he bathed, and one god after another has refused to go after it. Ea has the gods send for Belet-ili and proclaim her greatness in the assembly, in the same words as before: once Mami, now Mistress of All the Gods. What they want is her son. She gives them Ninurta, and her instructions to him are exact. Muster the seven winds. Flood the bird’s mountain home. Cut his throat, and let the wind carry his feathers to Enlil’s temple as the good news.

Her powers are the ones a midwife would claim, enlarged to the scale of the world. She shapes the child in the womb and opens the way out; she made the species, and she can name which god will be king, for she tells Ninurta that it was she who bore the Igigi and gave Anu and Enlil their thrones. A goddess of the same office, under the name Aruru, pinches off the clay that becomes Enkidu.

Her limits are as clear. She cannot make anything without Enki’s clay and Enki’s purification, and she says so. She cannot overrule Enlil, and when the assembly decides on the Flood her word goes with it and cannot be taken back. After the water recedes she and Enki settle the matter of human numbers together, and the settlement is grim: there will be women who do not bear, a demon who snatches babies from their mothers’ laps, and orders of priestesses for whom children are forbidden. The mother of everyone signs off on it. Her standing faded in the later second millennium as other gods rose, and she kept her temples at Babylon, Assur and Mari all the same, a goddess with blue flies at her neck.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Belet-ili in Mesopotamian mythology?

Belet-ili is the Akkadian mother goddess and midwife of the gods, whose name means “Mistress of the Gods”. She creates the first human beings from clay in the Babylonian Atrahasis epic. She is also called Mami and Nintu, and Babylonian scholars treated her as the same goddess as the Sumerian Ninhursag and Ninmah.

How did Mami create humans in the Atrahasis epic?

Mami mixed clay with the flesh and blood of a god who was killed for the purpose, after Enki had prepared the clay. She then pinched off fourteen pieces, set seven on her right and seven on her left with a mud brick between them, and the first humans were born in the tenth month. Humans were made so that they could do the hard labour the junior gods had refused to go on doing.

Why does Belet-ili wear a necklace of flies?

Belet-ili wears flies of lapis lazuli as a memorial of the Flood. After the waters fall, she lifts the great fly-shaped beads that Anu made for her and swears she will wear them so that she never forgets those days. The scene appears in both Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Is Belet-ili the same goddess as Ninhursag?

Belet-ili is the Akkadian counterpart of the Sumerian mother goddess known as Ninhursag, Ninmah and Nintur, and ancient scholars equated them. The stories differ by language. The Sumerian texts tell of Ninhursag and Enki, while the Akkadian texts give Belet-ili the creation of humankind in Atrahasis, the Flood lament, and a role in the Anzu epic.

What is Belet-ili’s role in the Anzu epic?

In the Anzu epic, Belet-ili is the mother of Ninurta and the goddess the gods turn to when no one else will fight the bird Anzu, who has stolen the Tablet of Destinies. The gods honour her with the title Mistress of All the Gods and ask for her son. She sends Ninurta and tells him how to defeat Anzu.

Related Entries

Ninhursag, Enki, Enlil, Anu, Ninurta, Anzû, Igigi, Anunnaki, Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Lamashtu (Labartu), Ishtar