at considerable length. When it is done, he embarks on a journey to Nippur, where he
is feted upon his arrival. Enki then gives a banquet in honor of Enlil, at the conclusion
of which Enlil makes a speech, expressing his joy at the construction of the new palace.
Enki and Ninhursag(Jacobsen 1987 a: 181 – 204 ; Bottéro and Kramer 1989 : 151 – 164 )
is set on the island of Bahrain, which the Sumerians called Dilmun. According to the
story, Dilmun was then a place where nothing unpleasant had ever happened, but it
did not have an adequate supply of fresh water. At the behest of the goddess Ninhursag,
Enki arranges for plentiful water, begetting grain, green plants, vegetables, and reeds in
abundance. With the coming of plants, the goddess of weaving, Uttu, is born. Enki
desires her and visits her house with fresh fruit as a present. When she welcomes him,
he rapes her, but Ninhursag somehow turns aside his sperm and uses it to make seven
plants. These plants having as yet no use in the world, Enki proposes to give each its
destiny, but insists on tasting each one first. Ninhursag, furious, wishes him dead, but
the gods are thrown into consternation at this, as they need Enki, so she makes him
sick instead. A mysterious figure appears, perhaps a fox, who offers to rescue Enki.
Ninhursag, somehow mollified, creates eight deities to cure each of Enki’s afflictions,
from head to foot, and these find their place in the cosmos.
The longest poem about Enki, Enki and the World Order(Bottéro and Kramer 1989 :
165 – 188 ; Black et al. 2004 : 215 – 225 ), praises him as provider for the gods and the human
race, measuring out the places for the stars in heaven and furnishing the world with
fields and flocks. He builds his palace and a wonderful boat, which he uses to take a
journey through all the lands the Sumerians knew. In Sumer itself, Enki blesses it for
diffusing civilization to all of them. From there he goes on to Meluhha (the Indus
Valley), Dilmun (Bahrain), Elam and Marhashi (south and south-central Iran), and
Martu (the Mid- to Upper Euphrates). He organizes the marshes, the sea, and the
clouds; human tasks such as agriculture, husbandry and the construction of shelter,
weaving, metal work, hunting and fishing, writing, midwifery, and prostitution. When
Inanna protests that nothing has been given her, Enki ordains her mistress of conflict
and contradiction. She will bring sorrow where there is happiness, both misery
and bliss.
Tales of originsMesopotamian mythology generally held that the human race had been created to
serve the gods and to relieve them of the necessity of working to sustain themselves
(survey in Lambert 2008 ). The inspiration for this came from Enki, while a mother or
birth goddess, under various names, such as Ninmah, fashioned the first human being.
In Enki and Ninmah(Bottéro and Kramer 1989 : 188 – 198 ; Klein in Hallo 1997 : 1 ,
516 – 518 ), when humans have been created and the gods celebrate their new leisure,
Enki and Ninmah have a drunken contest, in which Ninmah creates various defective
human creatures but Enki finds a use for each one. Finally, Enki instructs Ninmah to
produce the most helpless creature of all, with the participation of a man and a woman
(Kilmer 1976 ). This monstrosity cannot walk, talk, or feed itself – it is the human baby!
Enki challenges Ninmah to find a use for such a thing, but she is unable to do so. One
could scarcely pen a crueler caricature of the human race than this.
Other creation stories existed in both Sumerian and Akkadian. The interaction of
Enki and the birth goddess is the key element in the longest of them, the Akkadian
–– Sumerian mythology ––