Ninhursag

The clay comes up from the rim of the Abzu, the sweet water that lies under the ground, and it is still cool and heavy when she takes it in her hands. She pinches it, works it, gives it a shape and a spine and the small wet machinery of a body, and then she does the harder thing. She sits with it while it draws its first breath. This is the labor that belongs to Ninhursag more than to any other god in Sumer. Not the storm, not the turning of the seasons, not the granting of crowns. The oldest work there is, coaxing a living thing out of mud and staying beside it until it is born.

She answers to more names than almost anyone in the pantheon, and each one is a door into a different corner of her power. Ninhursag means lady of the mountain, or of the stony foothills where the wild herds graze and the flocks are driven up in summer. As Nintu she is simply the lady of birth. As Ninmah she is the exalted lady who sits in the assembly of the great gods. As Aruru she pinches off the clay; as Mami and, in Akkadian, Belet-ili, the lady of the gods, she is the mother who answers when a woman is in labor. The names cluster around one figure the way midwives cluster around a birth, each doing a slightly different part of the same work.

Her emblem is stranger and older than she is easy to picture. On boundary stones and in temple art she is tied to a coiled sign shaped like the Greek letter omega, read by those who study these things as a stylized womb, sometimes set beside a small knife that would cut the umbilical cord. She wears the horned crown that marks a deity and a robe of tiered flounces, and now and then a young lion pads at her side or lies across her lap. The omega turns up on carved stones from deep in the third millennium, and it kept its meaning for the better part of two thousand years. Whoever saw it knew what it promised.

Long before the male gods sorted themselves into kings, she was already one of the four powers who between them made the world work: the sky father An, the storm lord Enlil, the clever water god Enki, and the mother. In the myth of Enki and Ninmah the gods are worn out with digging the rivers and hauling the earth, and the primeval mother Nammu wakes Enki to end their misery. On his instruction the clay of the Abzu is pinched off, and Ninmah takes her place among the birth goddesses to bring the new creatures into being. Then, at the feast that follows, the two of them drink too much and turn creation into a contest. She molds one flawed human after another, a barren woman, a being with neither male nor female parts, a person who cannot bend, and dares Enki to find each of them a place in the world. He does, every time. Then he shapes a creature so frail and decrepit it can barely hold up its own head, and asks her to give it a use. She cannot. The wager ends with the plain fact of human weakness sitting between them, and no one wins.

The tale that follows her longest is set in Dilmun, a clean bright land with no sickness and no death. There Ninhursag grows a marsh full of plants, and Enki, restless and hungry, eats eight of them one after another to learn what each one is. They were hers, and she curses him with a curse that gives no life to the eye, and she leaves. Enki begins to die by inches, a fresh agony blooming in eight parts of his body. The other gods sit in the dust, helpless, until a fox goes and fetches her back. She takes the sick god and seats him against her, close as a birthing stool, and for each ailing part she gives birth to a healing deity. For his sore rib she bears Ninti, whose name means both the lady of the rib and the lady who makes live, because in Sumerian the word for rib and the word for life are the same. Anyone who knows the garden in Genesis, where a woman is made from a rib, has met a distant cousin of this scene.

Her gift is generation, and everything she does flows from it. She quickens the clay, opens the womb, brings down the milk, greens the foothills after the rains, and raises up new gods to mend what is broken. Her weakness is folded into the same gift and cannot be cut away from it. The bodies she makes come out flawed, and the decrepit thing Enki set before her stayed beyond her mending. Birth carries death inside it like a seed. And there is a slower loss she could do nothing about. She helped make the first people out of mud, and in time those people made a theology that no longer needed a mother at its head, one where Enlil’s wife Ninlil and the fierce Inanna took the light, and the lady of the mountain slipped quietly down the lists. Her rank did not hold. What held was the clay, and the sign of the womb, and the memory that before there were kings there was someone who sat with a shapeless thing until it breathed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ninhursag?

Ninhursag is the great mother goddess of ancient Sumer and one of the oldest and highest deities in the Mesopotamian pantheon. Her name means “lady of the mountain,” and she was worshipped as the maker of gods and humans, the mistress of birth and fertility, with major cult centers at Kesh and Adab. She is also known as Ninmah, Nintu, Aruru, Mami, and, in Akkadian, Belet-ili.

What is Ninhursag the goddess of?

Ninhursag is the goddess of birth, fertility, creation, and healing, and of the wild foothills where herds and flocks graze. She served as the midwife of the gods and was credited with forming humankind from clay, so she was invoked both at childbirth and in times of illness. Her power is the power of generation itself, from the greening of the land to the shaping of new life.

Did Ninhursag create humans?

Yes. In the Sumerian myth Enki and Ninmah, humans are pinched from the clay of the Abzu, the sweet-water deep, to take over the hard labor the gods no longer wanted, and Ninhursag acts as the midwife who brings them into being. In the same story she and Enki hold a drunken contest of shaping flawed humans, which explains why human bodies are imperfect. Under her Akkadian names Mami and Belet-ili she also forms mankind in later Babylonian myths.

What is the myth of Enki and Ninhursag?

In the myth set in the paradise land of Dilmun, Ninhursag grows eight plants that Enki then eats, and in anger she curses him, causing sickness to strike eight parts of his body. After a fox brings her back, she seats the dying Enki against her and gives birth to eight healing deities, one for each afflicted part. For his ailing rib she creates Ninti, “the lady of the rib” or “the lady who makes live,” a scene often compared to the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib.

Why did Ninhursag lose her high rank?

Ninhursag was once among the four or five supreme creator gods of Sumer, alongside An, Enlil, and Enki, but her status declined over time as Mesopotamian religion came to center on male deities and their consorts. Goddesses such as Ninlil, the wife of Enlil, and the powerful Inanna rose in prominence while the mother-goddess role was gradually diminished. She remained honored in cult, but no longer stood at the head of the pantheon.

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Enki, Enlil, Ninurta, Inanna, Ereshkigal, Tiamat, Marduk, Kingu, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Gaia, Cybele, Isis, Rhea