Ea, known in Sumerian as Enki, is the god of fresh water, wisdom, magic and the crafts, who dwells in the Abzu, the freshwater deep beneath the earth from which springs and rivers were thought to rise. In the arid south of Mesopotamia, where life depended on irrigation from the sweet waters rather than the salt sea, a god of the underground fresh water was a god of life itself, and Ea is correspondingly clever, benevolent and inventive, the patron of the exorcists and the craftsmen, the solver of problems that defeat the other gods. His city was Eridu, held in the tradition to be the oldest city of all, where his temple the E-abzu stood.
Ea's images regularly show streams of water, sometimes teeming with fish, flowing from his shoulders or from a vase he holds, an image of the Abzu's life-giving flood made visible, and he is closely tied to the composite goat-fish creature suhurmashu, an emblem later carried into the zodiac as the sign Capricorn. Mesopotamian tradition credited Ea with sending seven sage-counsellors, the apkallu, in the age before the flood to teach humanity the arts of civilisation, writing, building and ritual, a myth that made him not only the god who saved humankind from the deluge but also the one who had equipped it beforehand to become civilised at all.