Enki

Beneath Eridu, under the reed beds and the brick and the salt crust of the marsh, the Sumerians placed a sea. Not the bitter ocean that ringed the world but a body of sweet water, cool and motionless, that welled up through springs and fed the wells and the two great rivers. They called it the Abzu, and the god who lived in it was Enki. He did not rule from a mountain or a storm. He ruled from below, from the freshwater deep, in a house whose floor was water and whose whole business was knowing things.

He was the clever one. Where the other great gods settled matters by weight of thunder, Enki settled them by thinking, and that difference is most of his character. The art that filled Mesopotamia for three thousand years shows him as a seated figure with a long curled beard and a horned crown, a pleated robe falling to his feet, and two ropes of water pouring from his shoulders to the ground with small fish climbing up the streams against the flow. His sign was the goat-fish, a creature with a goat’s forequarters and the tail of a carp, the same beast that the sky-watchers would later set among the stars as Capricorn. The turtle was his too, and a curved staff finished with a ram’s head. The water was the point of all of it. It ran from his body the way wisdom ran from his mind, steady, generous, and impossible to dam.

His beginnings are told more than one way, as the oldest things usually are. In the Sumerian accounts he is the son of Nammu, the primeval freshwater sea who existed before the gods and gave birth to heaven and earth out of herself. Other texts make him a son of the sky god An. His name reads, awkwardly, as Lord of the Earth, though his realm was water and never soil, and nobody has fully explained the mismatch. The Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians who inherited him called him Ea and kept everything that mattered: the deep, the wisdom, the fondness for mankind.

The reason there are humans at all is, in these stories, his idea. The lesser gods had been set to dig the rivers and canals and grew sick of the work, and they came in the night to surround the house of Enki, who was asleep in the deep and did not at first stir. Roused by his mother, he proposed a substitute labourer. From the clay of the Abzu, mixed in one version with the blood of a slain god so that the new creature would carry a spark of divine intelligence, he and the mother goddess shaped people to take up the baskets and the hoes. There is a stranger telling in which Enki and the goddess Ninmah drink too much beer at the celebration and fall to daring each other. She moulds humans with broken bodies, the blind, the trembling, the lame, and challenges him to find a place for each. He does, every time, fitting the blind man to the harp and the barren woman to the palace. Then he makes a creature so feeble it can neither stand nor speak, and asks her to find its place, and she cannot. The contest is left where it lies.

Having made humanity, he refused to let it be unmade. The gods multiplied their workers and the workers multiplied themselves until their noise rose up and broke Enlil’s sleep, and Enlil sent first plague, then drought, then famine to thin them, and each time Enki quietly taught the people how to survive. At last Enlil called for a flood to drown them all and bound the gods by oath to keep it secret. Enki kept the letter of his oath and broke its spirit. He went to the reed wall of the hut where the righteous man slept, Ziusudra in the Sumerian, Atrahasis and later Utnapishtim in the Akkadian, and spoke to the wall rather than the man, and the man, listening on the other side, heard how to build a boat. So the flood came and the world was scoured and one keel rode it out, because a god had whispered to a fence.

He was not above being outwitted himself, and the funniest of his stories turns on it. Inanna came down to Eridu, sat with him, and drank with him cup for cup, and as the beer went down Enki grew expansive and began handing over the me, the more than one hundred decrees that hold civilization together, kingship and craft and music and even falsehood and the sacking of cities. He gave them all to her. When he woke sober and found the loading dock empty, he sent his two-faced vizier Isimud chasing after her boat with monsters of the deep to take them back, and it did no good. The me reached Uruk and stayed there. He drank too much.

His gifts follow from the deep he came out of. He commands fresh water and so commands life in a dry land, and he commands wisdom and so commands the spells and rites that the healers of Mesopotamia recited over the sick, naming Ea as the source of every cure. He decrees fates, organizes the rivers and the marsh and the trades, and out of pure skill solves what brute force cannot. His weaknesses sit right beside the gifts. He is ruled by his appetites, undone by drink and by desire, careless enough to give away the engines of civilization at a party. His help is reactive, arriving after the disaster is already moving, a fixer rather than a preventer. And for all his reach, he is bound to the sweet water; away from the deep, the cleverest god in the world is only a god a long way from home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Enki in Mesopotamian mythology?

Enki, known to the Akkadians and Babylonians as Ea, is the Mesopotamian god of fresh water, wisdom, magic, and craft. He lives in the Abzu, the freshwater deep beneath the city of Eridu, and is one of the supreme gods of the pantheon, famous for solving problems by cunning rather than force.

What is Enki the god of?

Enki is the god of fresh water, wisdom, magic and incantation, and craftsmanship. He decrees fates, organizes the order of the world, and is credited with the creation of humankind, which also makes him the divine patron of healers and exorcists who claimed their knowledge came from him.

How did Enki create humans?

In the Sumerian and Akkadian myths, Enki proposed creating humans to take over the hard labour the lesser gods refused to do. Working with a mother goddess, he shaped people from the clay of the Abzu, mixed in one version with the blood of a slain god so they would carry a spark of divine intelligence.

How did Enki save humanity from the flood?

When Enlil decreed a flood to wipe out noisy humankind and bound the gods to secrecy, Enki kept his oath by speaking to a reed wall instead of directly to a person. The flood hero, called Ziusudra, Atrahasis, or Utnapishtim depending on the version, overheard through the wall and built a boat, surviving the deluge.

What is the story of Inanna stealing the me from Enki?

In the myth Inanna and Enki, the goddess Inanna visited Enki at Eridu and drank with him until, drunk and generous, he gave her the me, the divine decrees that underpin civilization. When he sobered up he sent his vizier Isimud and monsters of the deep to retrieve them, but Inanna reached Uruk first and kept them.

Related Entries

Enlil, Inanna, Ninhursag, Marduk, Apkallu, Adapa, Utnapishtim, Tiamat, Ishtar, Gilgamesh, Ninurta, Nergal, Ereshkigal, Shamash, Sin