Nammu

Under the mudflats south of the Euphrates the water never really stops. Dig into that ground and it comes up cold and grey and rising faster than one man can bail, and the people of Eridu, who lived on the lip of the marsh and knew its smell in every season, gave that water a name and called her mother.

Her name was written with a single sign, ENGUR, the same sign that spells the deep water itself. That looks like an identification and it is not one. The scribes call her the one who made the engur, which sets her a step behind the water rather than inside it, and the size of that step has never been agreed. Some read her as the salt sea, some as the sweet water under the fields, and a recent reading makes her the groundwater, the seep that fills a well overnight. No surviving text comes out and states that she is the sea.

What the texts do say is grander and vaguer. She is the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth. She is the first mother who bore the senior gods. She is the lady who is great and high in the water. A god list hands her An and Ki as children, sky and earth, the two halves of everything, which makes her the oldest thing in Sumer with a name attached. That name is usually rendered creatrix, though the specialists who render it that way argue about the grammar behind it, and one of them has concluded there is no secure etymology at all. They agree she comes first. None of them can say precisely what she is.

She has no husband in that role, and the absence looks deliberate rather than accidental. One object breaks the pattern. A foundation peg cut for Lugal-kisalsi, king of Uruk and Ur, around 2400 BCE, records in a few lines of cuneiform that he built the temple of Namma, wife of An. Somebody carried that peg down into a trench in the wet season, packed it round with clay, and covered it over, and nothing else in the whole surviving record repeats the claim. She is otherwise a mother without a marriage, creating on her own account.

The one story that gives her lines is a tablet composition usually called Enki and Ninmah, copied in the Old Babylonian period and possibly older, and still being copied in Akkadian translation for Ashurbanipal’s library more than a thousand years later. It opens on divine manual labour. The junior gods are digging canals and heaping the dredged silt into spoil banks, and they are sick of it. Enki, who is her son and the one with the skill to fix it, is asleep in the deep water where no other god can reach him. So Namma gathers up the tears of the complaining gods, carries them down to the bed where he lies, and tells him to get up. The line is one of the most human in Sumerian literature. Are you really lying there asleep, and not awake?

He gets up, slaps his thigh in irritation, thinks, and then tells his mother what to do: knead clay from the top of the abzu, let the birth goddesses nip pieces off it, and bring the form into existence. Seven goddesses stand by while she gives birth. Ninmah is assigned as her assistant. When it is done Enki throws a feast for the two of them, roast kid and bread and beer, and the senior gods stand around praising him for it. She is not mentioned again. The mother who thought of humanity walks out of the story at the banquet and the text never brings her back.

What follows is the part everyone remembers. Enki and Ninmah drink, and Ninmah bets that she can shape human bodies however she likes and dare him to find a use for them. She makes a man whose hands will not close, then one with ruined eyes, then one with dead feet, then a man who cannot hold his urine, then a barren woman, then a body with no sex at all, and Enki finds each of them a place at court or in a household. Then he takes his turn and makes Umul, whose head lolls, whose ribs shake, who cannot lift bread to his own mouth, and asks her to do the same for him. She cannot. Neither alive nor dead, she says, and the argument ends with Ninmah beaten and the god of wisdom praising his own anatomy.

Nobody ever drew her. No text describes her face, her dress, her height or her age, and the sign her name is written with is a sign for water, not a portrait. What the record gives instead is a set of functions: she bears, she kneads, she wakes people up. That is not a small silence, because primordial beings in Mesopotamia are usually retired figures, inert once their work is over, and Namma was not. She keeps turning up in incantations centuries after the cosmos is finished, invoked over a bowl of water to consecrate a room or to force a sickness out of a body, alongside Enki and Asalluhi and Nanshe. She was still working.

Her powers follow from that. She makes without being made, without a consort, out of the water and the clay that comes with it; she has the authority to decree a fate for what she has borne; and her name carries enough force in ritual to clean a house or turn a scorpion. She is also, and this is worth saying plainly, not dangerous. There is no version of her that has to be killed. Set beside Tiamat, the salt sea of the Babylonian creation epic who is split like a fish to make the sky, Namma is a creator nobody had to defeat, and the two were probably never as closely linked as later readers assumed.

The limits are all on the other side of the ledger, and they are severe. For a goddess of that rank the evidence of actual worship is threadbare. A settlement in the earliest hymns whose name cannot even be read; Lugal-kisalsi’s temple at Uruk; offerings and a small priesthood at Ur in the Old Babylonian period, with a field named after her; entry number 107 in a god list from Nippur; a temple in the marshy Sealand that survived into the second millennium. Theophoric names were the real test and she failed it, since for a long time the only person known to have carried her name was the king Ur-Nammu, and later work has turned up two more. The calendars gave her the twenty-seventh of the month, shared with Nergal. In the great temples at Nippur and Babylon she had a shrine called the footstep of Nammu, still being recorded by Nabonidus’ clerks in the sixth century BCE. The mother of heaven and earth ended with a footprint on somebody else’s floor.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nammu?

Nammu, also read Namma, is a Mesopotamian creator goddess belonging above all to the local theology of the city of Eridu. She was regarded as the mother who gave birth to heaven and earth and to the senior gods, and as the mother of Enki. Her name was written with the sign for the deep water, and she is generally understood to be a water deity, though the sources never state exactly which water.

What did Nammu do in the Sumerian creation of humankind?

In the composition known as Enki and Ninmah, Nammu is the one who acts first. The junior gods are worn out by digging canals, and she carries their tears to her sleeping son Enki and wakes him, and on his instructions she kneads clay from the top of the abzu and gives birth to the first human form while seven birth goddesses stand by. Her presence is what separates this account from other Mesopotamian versions of the creation of people, such as Atra-Hasis, where she does not appear.

Is Nammu the same as Tiamat?

No. They are separate goddesses from different traditions, and the popular claim that the Babylonians simply renamed Nammu as Tiamat is not supported by the evidence. Tiamat is an antagonist who is killed and cut apart to make the world, while there is no version of Nammu in which she is hostile or has to be defeated. Some scholars think the sea associations of the two figures influenced each other, but a recent study argues they were never closely connected.

Was Nammu married?

Almost certainly not, in the tradition where she matters most. As the creator goddess of Eridu she produces the cosmos with no partner named anywhere. A single foundation inscription of Lugal-kisalsi, king of Uruk, dating to around 2400 BCE, calls her the wife of An, but it stands alone and the usual conclusion is that she had no traditional spouse.

Was Nammu widely worshipped?

No, and the gap between her cosmic rank and her actual cult is one of the strangest things about her. She had a temple at Uruk, offerings and clergy at Ur, a shrine in the Sealand and small chapels called the footstep of Nammu inside the great temples of Nippur and Babylon. Even so, personal names invoking her are extremely rare, with king Ur-Nammu long thought to be the only example.

Related Entries

Enki, Ninhursag, Apsu, Tiamat, Enlil, Marduk, Anunnaki, Kingu, Adapa, Ereshkigal, Nergal, Nüwa, Khnum, Gaia, Ymir