A different side of Enki's character appears in the myth called Inanna and Enki, in which the goddess Inanna travels to Enki's city of Eridu and is welcomed by him with a great feast of beer. As the drinking continues and Enki grows steadily more intoxicated, he begins, in an expansive and increasingly careless mood, to grant Inanna one after another of the me, the several dozen sacred, fixed decrees or powers that Sumerian thought held to underlie every institution and skill of civilization, kingship, priesthood, the crafts, sexual love, the arts of war and of writing, and even negative powers such as falsehood and strife, presenting each as a gift befitting her honored status as his guest. Once Inanna has secured the full set, she loads them onto her boat and sets off for her own city of Uruk.
When Enki sobers up and realizes what he has given away, he is horrified and sends his minister Isimud along with a series of sea monsters to pursue Inanna's boat and recover the me before she can reach home, but Inanna, aided by her own minister Ninshubur, repels each attempt, and she arrives at Uruk in triumph with the powers of civilization intact, to a joyous welcome. Enki ultimately accepts the transfer rather than continuing to fight it, and the myth is generally read as an origin story explaining how Uruk, rather than Enki's own city of Eridu, came to be a great centre of civilized order and institutions, achieved not through conquest or divine decree from above but through a goddess's cleverness and a god's own generous, if drunken, hospitality getting the better of him.