Igigi

Igigu, or Igigi, is an Akkadian collective name for a group of gods, and the text that fixed it in the modern imagination is Atrahasis, the Old Babylonian poem of the flood. The poem opens on a world with no people in it, where the gods do their own labour and find it crushing. Seven great Anunnaki, it says, were making the Igigu bear the work. The junior gods dug the watercourses and carried the earth, and in the end they refused to carry on. They burned their tools, went to the house of Enlil by night, and surrounded it.

The tablet breaks up at that point, but the outcome does not. The senior gods had to find another way for the work to be done, and the answer was humanity, made so that the labour the Igigi had thrown down would fall to people instead. That is the Mesopotamian account of why anyone is here at all, and it starts with a strike.

The Igigi turn up elsewhere, less dramatically. The prologue to the Code of Hammurabi says that the Anunnaki raised Marduk high among the Igigi, which is the one piece of evidence placing a named god securely inside the group. The Anzu myth speaks of an assembly of the Igigu, though whether that was a standing institution or a turn of phrase is doubted. They are named in Enuma Elish, in the poem of Erra, and in incantations and prayers down to the end of the cuneiform tradition. What they are never given is a face: because the word names a group and not a figure, no image of the Igigi is known.

The Igigi are hardly ever discussed on their own. They are discussed against the Anunna, or Anunnaki, and the relation between the two names is one of the open questions of the field. Nicole Brisch, writing for the Oracc project Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, says outright that the term Igigu is as complicated as Anunna, that it is not entirely clear what distinguishes one group from the other, and that the question needs a comprehensive new study.

What can be said is that the two words behave differently at different dates. Igigu is first attested in Old Babylonian texts and occurs only in Akkadian contexts; its Sumerian logographic equivalent, nun-gal-e-ne, means the great princes. In Atrahasis the Igigi are plainly the junior party, working for the Anunnaki. From the Middle Babylonian period onward the pair is read the other way about, with the Igigi as gods of heaven and the Anunnaki as gods of the underworld. In some texts the two names are used as though they meant the same thing, and in others, such as the poem of Erra, they are held apart.

The size of the group is contested as well. Von Soden argued for seven, Kienast for eight, and Black and Green give ten, each on different evidence; Kienast proposed Ishtar, Asarluhi, Ninurta, Nuska and Shamash among the members. Some gods appear to belong to both groups at once. The etymology is no better settled: Old Akkadian, Amorite and Arabic origins have all been argued for. No cult place for the Igigi is known, and one position holds that they belong to literature alone rather than to worship.