Etana

Also Known As: Sumerian and Akkadian Etana; king of Kish in the Sumerian King List, where he is called the shepherd who went up to heaven; hero of the Akkadian poem known as the Etana Epic or the Legend of Etana
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Mesopotamian Mythology, Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian Mythology, Sumerian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Etana is a mortal king of Kish who rides to the sky on the back of an eagle to ask the gods for the plant of birth.
Role in Mythos: He is the model of the first true king, picked by the gods to rule, and the man whose need for an heir carries him higher than any person had gone.
Relation to Humans: He is human, a shepherd raised to the throne, and his trouble is an ordinary one: he has no child. The king list makes him the founder of a line, with a son named Balih who reigned after him.

Two dogs sit on the ground with their noses pointed at the sky. Beside them a shepherd lifts one arm, and a goat goes on eating. Above all of them, cut small into a stone cylinder about the length of a thumb, a man is leaving the earth on the back of an eagle. The seals that carry this scene were carved in the time of the kings of Akkad, around 2250 BCE, and they are older than any written copy of the story they show. The man is Etana, king of Kish.

The Sumerian King List gives him one line of praise. It names him as a shepherd, says he went up to heaven and says he brought all the lands into order. It then gives him a reign of 1,500 years, or 635 in some copies, and a son called Balih who ruled 400 years after him. The list counts him as the thirteenth king of Kish after the Flood. The poem about him tells it another way and makes him the first.

In the poem the gods have built Kish and raised its walls, and the city has everything but a ruler. The crown and the sceptre are lying in heaven in front of Anu with nobody to hold them. Ishtar goes looking for a shepherd, Enlil approves the choice, and Etana becomes king. He builds a shrine for the storm god Adad. A poplar grows beside it.

An eagle nests in the top of that tree and a serpent lives at its roots. The two of them swear friendship in front of Shamash, the sun god, who sees everything and judges fairly, and they lay a heavy curse on whichever of them breaks faith. For a while it works. One hunts while the other watches the young, and the meat is shared out in the shade under the branches. Wild bulls, gazelles, mountain goats. Both broods grow fat.

Then the eagle’s chicks are fledged, and the eagle looks down at the serpent’s young and thinks about eating them. The smallest eaglet, who is the cleverest, tells his father not to do it and reminds him of the net of Shamash. The eagle does it anyway. The serpent comes home that evening with his kill and finds an empty nest and claw marks in the dirt. He lies weeping in front of the sun.

Shamash tells him what to do. A wild bull lies dead on the plain. The serpent is to open its belly, crawl inside and wait. Birds of every kind come down to feed, and at last the eagle comes too, although the same small chick warns him a second time. When the eagle pushes his head into the carcass, the serpent takes him by the wing. He strips the feathers, cuts the wings and throws the bird into a pit to die of hunger and thirst.

The eagle prays from the bottom of that pit every day. Shamash will not come near an oath-breaker, but he says he will send a man. The man is Etana, who has been praying too. He has given sheep to the gods and incense to the dream interpreters, and what he wants is the plant of birth, because his wife has given him no son and a throne without an heir is only a chair. Shamash sends him over the mountain to the pit.

Etana feeds the bird for about seven months and teaches it to fly again as if it were a chick. It grows strong. It tells him he has earned whatever he wants, and he asks for the plant.

So the eagle tells him to put his chest against its back and his hands on its wing feathers, and it climbs. After one league it asks him to look down, and the land is a hill and the sea is a stream. After another the land is a garden plot and the sea a ditch a gardener might dig. After the third he cannot find the land at all. His nerve goes. He begs to go back to his city, lets go and falls, and the eagle drops after him and catches him a few feet above the ground.

He was a brave man, and he was frightened. The poem says so.

Back in Kish there are dreams. His wife has one, and Etana has several, and the eagle reads them as an invitation. In one he walks through the gates of heaven into a house where a young woman sits on a throne with lions crouched beneath it. They fly again. This time they pass the gate of Anu, Enlil and Ea and bow, and then the gate of Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, and bow again. Here the clay is broken, and no surviving tablet gives the end. Most readers think he got what he came for. The king list, after all, gives him a son.

The oldest written copies come from Susa and Tell Harmal and are about 3,700 years old. A Middle Assyrian version was found at Assur, and the fullest text lay in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Where the early and late copies overlap they match closely, sometimes word for word, across a thousand years.

Etana has no strength of his own beyond patience, piety and the sense to keep a hungry bird alive. Everything he achieves comes from a debt: the sun god owed him an answer and the eagle owed him its life. He could reach heaven only as a passenger, and the first time he could not even do that.

His limits are a man’s. He needed a child because he would die, and the plant was for making life, not for keeping it. When Enkidu dreams of the house of dust in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the dead sit in the dark and eat clay, he sees Etana sitting there with the rest.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Etana in Mesopotamian mythology?

Etana is a legendary king of the city of Kish. The Sumerian King List calls him a shepherd who went up to heaven, and an Akkadian poem tells how he flew there on the back of an eagle. He is a mortal man and not a god.

Why did Etana fly to heaven?

Etana flew to heaven to get the plant of birth. He had no son, and he needed an heir for the throne of Kish. The sun god Shamash sent him to an eagle that could carry him up to the gods.

What is the story of the eagle and the serpent?

An eagle and a serpent lived in the same tree and swore friendship before the sun god Shamash. The eagle broke the oath by eating the serpent’s young. On the advice of Shamash, the serpent hid inside a dead bull, caught the eagle, cut its wings and threw it into a pit, where Etana later found it and nursed it back to health.

Did Etana get the plant of birth?

The tablets break off before the end, so the poem does not say. On his first flight Etana lost his nerve and fell, and the eagle caught him. On the second flight he passed the gates of the gods, and the Sumerian King List says he was followed on the throne by his son Balih, which suggests he succeeded.

How old is the story of Etana?

The story of Etana is at least 4,200 years old. Cylinder seals from the Akkadian period, around 2250 BCE, show a man rising into the sky on an eagle while dogs and shepherds look up. The oldest written copies are Old Babylonian, and the fullest version comes from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh.