Oannes

The water off the Babylonian coast is warm and shallow and the colour of weak tea, and at first light it goes flat enough to hold a reflection. Something broke that surface in the first year of the world. It had scales the length of a forearm, it stood upright on human feet that had grown out beside a fish’s tail, and when it reached the shingle it spoke to the people waiting there in a language they understood. They had been living, by the account that survives, in the manner of animals. Within a day they were being taught how to write.

His name in Greek is Oannes, and the Greek is a transcription of something much older. Cuneiform sources call him Uanna or U-An, and he stands at the head of the apkallū, the seven sages sent by the freshwater god Ea to instruct humanity before the flood. A Seleucid-era tablet excavated in 1959 and 1960 from the temple of Anu at Uruk, now known as the Uruk List of Kings and Sages, sets seven antediluvian kings beside their seven advisors, and the first pairing is the king Ayalu with the sage U-An. On a handful of tablets the word adapa is appended to his name, which has kept scholars arguing for a century about whether he is the same figure as Adapa, the sage of Eridu who broke the wing of the south wind and then talked his way out of immortality.

The version everyone knows comes from a book nobody can read. Berossus was a Babylonian priest of Bel who wrote a history of his own country in Greek in the early third century BC, when Babylon had passed into the hands of Alexander’s successors and its temples were competing for attention with a foreign court. Berossus’ book is lost. What remains are fragments quoted by the epitomator Alexander Polyhistor, quoted in turn by Christian chroniclers, one of whose works survives complete only in an Armenian translation. The description of Oannes has therefore come to us in a fourth language, having passed through at least three sets of hands, and it is still the most vivid physical account of any Mesopotamian being.

The Armenian text is precise about the anatomy. The creature had the entire body of a fish, and by the fish’s head there was another, human head fitted to it; by the tail were human feet. It spoke articulately. It came out of the Erythraean Sea, the gulf, and it kept company with people through the daylight hours, taking absolutely no food. What it gave them was a curriculum. Letters and the techniques of the various crafts. How to found cities and raise temples. The principle of law. Weights and measures. How to fix a boundary and divide a field. How to gather seed and bring in a harvest. One line in the account does more work than all the rest: from that time on, no one has discovered anything more.

Then the sun went down and he walked back into the sea, and stayed out in the deep water until morning, and did the same thing the next day, and the day after.

Others followed him over the generations, one at a time or in groups of four, surfacing under later kings with names the Greek scribes mangled into Idotion, Odacon, Anedotos. The chronicle says flatly that all of them came from Oannes. Then the flood arrived in the reign of Xisuthrus, the sages went back under the water for good, and human wisdom was thereafter something inherited rather than received.

Mesopotamia did not treat this as a story about the distant past. It treated it as a chain of custody. Alan Lenzi’s work on the Uruk list has shown how late Babylonian and Assyrian scholars used these pairings to trace their own guild back through an unbroken succession of teachers to the first sage, who was credited with the authorship of the great astronomical omen series. If your knowledge came down from Oannes, it was not opinion. It was the original transmission.

The image outlasted the theology. Assyrian palace reliefs and small clay figurines show the apkallū as men wearing a fish, the head of a carp pulled over the skull like a hood and the skin hanging down the back to the heels, and priests appear to have worn exactly that costume, cut from the giant carp of the Tigris. A fish-cloaked sage of the parādu type stood at the entrance to the temple of Ninurta at Nimrud. Others were buried under house floors in sets of seven, faces outward, to turn back whatever was coming. The incantation series Bīt Mēseri gives the instructions for a household with a sick person in it: seven carp-apkallū drawn on the wall of the bedroom in gypsum and black paste, seven cut from consecrated cornel wood standing in the doorway nearest the bed, seven of tamarisk kneeling at its foot. Gypsum smells of nothing much and dries chalky under the fingers. The figures went up while the patient lay there listening.

His powers are entirely a matter of what he holds and what he is willing to hand over. He knows everything worth knowing, and he can teach it, which requires the human head and the human voice grafted onto him; the fish is what lets him carry it up out of the abyss, the freshwater deep that was Ea’s own domain. He needs no food, asks nothing, and never appears to tire.

The limits are just as exact. He cannot stay. Every evening the sea takes him back, and no story has him sleeping in a house or eating at a table or forming an attachment to anyone he taught. His gift is finite and closed at both ends: it arrived complete on the first day, nothing has been added since, and the flood shut the door behind it. And there is a final limitation that belongs to us rather than to him. The fullest portrait of the being who supposedly taught humanity to write survives only because a Greek summarised a Babylonian, a Christian summarised the Greek, and an Armenian translator copied the Christian.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Oannes in Mesopotamian mythology?

Oannes is the first of the seven antediluvian sages of Mesopotamian myth, a being with the body of a fish and a human head and feet who rose from the Persian Gulf to teach humanity civilization. His name is the Greek form of the Akkadian Uanna or Sumerian U-An. He served the first king of the world, before the flood.

What did Oannes teach humanity?

Oannes taught writing, the crafts, the building of cities and temples, law, weights and measures, land surveying, and how to plant and harvest crops. According to the account preserved from Berossus, everything necessary for settled life came from him, and nothing has been discovered since that he did not already give.

What did Oannes look like?

Berossus describes Oannes as having the complete body of a fish, with a second human head set beneath the fish’s head and human feet beside the tail, and the ability to speak. Assyrian art shows related sages as men wearing a carp’s skin as a cloak, the fish head worn as a hood, which is probably how the costume was worn by priests in ritual.

Is Oannes the same as Adapa?

Possibly. A few cuneiform tablets append the word adapa to the name U-An, and the two figures are both sages of the very first generation associated with the god Ea, so many scholars treat them as the same being under different names. The sources are not decisive, and the identification remains disputed.

Where does the story of Oannes come from?

It comes from the Babyloniaca, a history of Babylonia written in Greek by the Babylonian priest Berossus in the early third century BC. That book is lost, and the passage survives only through later writers who quoted a summary of it, most completely in an Armenian translation of Eusebius’ Chronicle. Cuneiform sources such as the Uruk List of Kings and Sages confirm the sage himself independently of the Greek account.

Related Entries

Apkallu, Adapa, Enki, Anunnaki, Marduk, Tiamat, Ninurta, Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Lamassu, Shedu, Anzu, Dagon, Matsya, Tritons