Enki

Enki is unusual among the great gods of Mesopotamia in that his interests and humanity's tend to coincide. The pattern shows most clearly in the flood. In the Old Babylonian poem Atrahasis the gods make human beings to do the work of digging the canals, because the lesser gods have gone on strike and refused to keep digging. Humanity multiplies, and the noise of it keeps Enlil awake. He sends plague, then drought, then famine, and each time Enki tells the man Atrahasis how to divert the disaster. Finally Enlil resolves on a flood and binds all the gods by oath to say nothing.

Enki keeps the oath and breaks it. He does not speak to Atrahasis. He speaks to the reed wall of the man's house, telling the wall to tear down the house and build a boat, while the man happens to be listening on the other side. The device is not a joke at the gods' expense; it is a serious point about how oaths and speech work, and the same scene appears in the flood tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the survivor is called Utnapishtim. When the waters recede and Enlil discovers that someone lived, Enki argues him down: punish the sinner for his own sin, send lions and famine to thin the population rather than a flood that takes everyone.

That argument is worth noticing. It is a god telling another god that collective punishment is unjust, in a text written down well before 1600 BC. The relationship between these Mesopotamian flood accounts and the one in Genesis has been debated since George Smith read the Gilgamesh flood tablet to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in 1872, and the number of shared details, the boat, the birds sent out, the sacrifice on the mountain that the gods smell, makes some connection generally accepted, though the route by which it travelled is not settled.

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.

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.