{"it":{"id":"TX002","kind":"text","sub":"Sumerian","name":"Enki and Ninmah","place":"Paris","date":"c. Old Babylonian copies (early 2nd mill. BCE)","oldest":"c.1800 BCE","inst":"AO 7936 (Louvre); BM 12845; CBS 2168+2202+11327+12738+13368 (Penn); N 1889, N 2571…","lang":"Sumerian","src":[200,503,484],"lat":48.861,"lon":2.336,"tags":["Near East"],"sum":"The gods are tired of digging canals. In the Sumerian story of Enki and Ninmah, the junior gods dredge clay and pile up silt until they complain, and wise Enki, asleep in the deep waters, is woken to fix it. His answer is humans, shaped from clay taken 'from the top of the abzu', to carry the baskets instead.\n\nThen the story turns. At a feast, Enki and Ninmah drink beer, and Ninmah boasts that she can make a human body good or bad as she wishes. She fashions a series of people: a man whose hands cannot bend, and, sixth, a being with neither male nor female organs. For each one, Enki finds a place: a role at court, a fate, daily bread.\n\nWhat is hard to explain, for some readers, is why a creation myth dwells on flawed people at all.\n\nZecharia Sitchin, in The 12th Planet, read this as a lab record. The six beings were, he wrote, failed attempts at genetic manipulation before the gods produced a perfect worker, Adapa. The text answers him itself. Ninmah makes the beings after drinking beer, as a contest, and the point of the story is Enki's reply: every body, however it is made, gets a place in society. It is a story about work and about the place of disabled people, told in a world where both were real.\n\nThe open question is why Sumerians told it. A culture that explained disability through a drinking contest between gods was also deciding who belongs.","why":"A Sumerian creation story that reads very differently once you follow it to the end.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Read the ETCSL translation (1.1.2) and mark every line about labour.","rel":["TX004","TX007"],"hook":"In a Sumerian myth, a goddess makes six imperfect humans from clay. Zecharia Sitchin read failed experiments."},"S":{"200":["etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk","https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm"],"503":["Wikipedia: Ninhursag","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninhursag"],"484":["Wikipedia: Zecharia Sitchin","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin"]},"rec":{"id":"TX002","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA106","a":"Genetic engineering lab with failed prototypes.","who":"Sitchin","main":"Etiology of labour, disability and social roles; contest myth between two deities.","ms":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.1.2 ll.1-11","q":"\"the senior gods oversaw the work, while the minor gods were bearing the toil.\"","exact":"yes","tr":"ETCSL (Black et al.)","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm","mo":"labour motive"},{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.1.2 ll.24-37","q":"\"You should knead clay from the top of the abzu\"","exact":"yes","tr":"ETCSL","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm","mo":"creation from clay"},{"ref":"ETCSL t.1.1.2 ll.56-78","q":"Ninmah fashions six flawed humans; Enki assigns each a role. [paraphrase]","exact":"no","tr":"ETCSL","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm","mo":"prototypes"}],"tr":[{"by":"ETCSL","yr":"1998","t":"Enki and Ninmah t.1.1.2","lic":"open","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm"}],"mo":[{"v":"clay_or_earth","ev":"P003","n":"Sumerian origin of the Mesopotamian motif","url":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm"}],"tl":[],"wit":[],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Etiology of labour, disability and social roles; contest myth between two deities.","alternative_reading":"Genetic engineering lab with failed prototypes.","alt_proponent":"Sitchin","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Sitchin reads as genetics; Assyriologists see clay-modelling (potter) metaphor.","key_theme":"humans made from clay of the abzu to relieve gods' toil; flawed prototypes","language":"Sumerian","physical_object_institution":"AO 7936 (Louvre); BM 12845; CBS 2168+2202+11327+12738+13368 (Penn); N 1889, N 2571 (Nippur) -- per ETCSL c.1.1.2 cuneiform sources","composition_date":"c. Old Babylonian copies (early 2nd mill. BCE)","oldest_ms_date":"c.1800 BCE","b":"V"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0645","t":"etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk","u":"https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Ninhursag","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninhursag"},{"id":"S0636","t":"Wikipedia: Zecharia Sitchin","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin"},{"id":"VTX002-4","t":"Sitchin, The 12th Planet, ch. 12 (Biblioteca Pleyades, believer source)","u":"https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sitchin/planeta12/12planeteng_12.htm"}],"qs":["Four thousand years ago, Sumerians wrote that humans were made to do the gods' labour. Where does that idea come from?","Sitchin saw failed experiments; the text gives each being a place at court. Which reading fits the story better?"],"sum":"# Enki and Ninmah: The Gods Who Made Us From Clay\n\nA mother carries tears to her son. In the Sumerian poem known as Enki and Ninmah, the goddess Namma, \"the primeval mother who gave birth to the senior gods,\" gathers up the weeping of the gods and brings it down into the deep water where Enki lies asleep, in \"the place the inside of which no other god knows.\" The gods are worn out. They are digging canals and piling up silt, and they have begun to complain. \"My son, wake up from your bed!\" she tells him. \"Create a substitute for the gods so that they can be freed from their toil!\"\n\nWhat Enki creates, in answer, is us.\n\n## A myth on clay tablets\n\nEnki and Ninmah is a Sumerian poem of about 140 lines, preserved on clay tablets in the Old Babylonian period, the early second millennium BC, with the oldest copies dated around 1800 BC. Pieces of it are held in several collections. Its sources include a tablet in the Louvre in Paris, AO 7936, another in the British Museum, a group of joined fragments in the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and tablets dug at Nippur. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at Oxford, which published an open English translation in 1998, builds its text from these copies, and much of what follows is quoted from it. Several passages are broken, and the translators mark the gaps.\n\nThe two main characters are major gods. Enki was the god of wisdom and of the fresh waters under the earth, the abzu. Ninmah, whose name means \"great lady,\" was one of the names of the mother goddess also known as Ninhursag, a goddess of birth, called in other texts \"midwife of the gods\" and \"mother of all children.\" In this poem Enki calls her his sister.\n\n## The first workers\n\nThe poem opens in the time \"when heaven and earth were created,\" when the gods were being born and married and sent to their places. It is precise about the social order: \"the senior gods oversaw the work, while the minor gods were bearing the toil.\" The labour is the hard, physical work of irrigation farming, the work that built Sumer, the digging of channels and the clearing of silt.\n\nWoken by his mother, Enki slaps his thigh in annoyance, retires to his room for pondering, and then gives instructions. \"Impose on him the work of carrying baskets,\" he says of the new creature. \"You should knead clay from the top of the abzu; the birth-goddesses will nip off the clay and you shall bring the form into existence.\" Ninmah is to assist, and seven named birth goddesses are to stand by. The design is Enki's; the making is done by women who handle birth.\n\nThat is the first purpose the poem gives for human beings. We were made to take over a job the gods no longer wanted.\n\n## A drinking contest\n\nThen the story turns. Enki throws a feast. The gods praise him. And then, as the translation puts it, \"Enki and Ninmah drank beer, their hearts became elated.\" Ninmah makes a boast: \"Man's body can be either good or bad and whether I make a fate good or bad depends on my will.\" Enki takes her up on it. Whatever she makes, he says, he will balance with a fate.\n\nShe takes clay from the top of the abzu and begins. First she makes \"a man who could not bend his outstretched weak hands.\" Enki makes him a servant of the king. Second comes a man who \"turned back the light,\" apparently a man who could not see, and Enki gives him the musical arts and a place before the king. Third is a man with paralysed feet, set to work alongside the silversmith. Fourth is a man who cannot hold his urine; Enki bathes him in enchanted water and drives the demon out of his body. Fifth is a woman who cannot give birth, and Enki places her in the queen's household. Sixth is a being \"with neither penis nor vagina,\" whom Enki names and appoints to stand before the king.\n\nNinmah throws the leftover clay on the ground, \"and a great silence fell.\"\n\n## Enki's turn\n\nNow Enki makes a creature and challenges her to find it a place. His creation is called Umul, and the text lists its afflictions organ by organ: head, eyes, neck, lungs, heart, bowels. It can hardly breathe. It cannot reach for bread. Ninmah questions it, and it cannot speak. \"The man you have fashioned is neither alive nor dead,\" she says. She has no fate to give it.\n\nThe ending is broken in places, but Ninmah's reply survives in part, and it is bitter: her city is ruined, her house destroyed, she herself a fugitive. Enki has the last word, and the poem closes with a line of praise: \"Ninmah could not rival the great lord Enki. Father Enki, your praise is sweet!\"\n\n## What scholars hear in it\n\nAssyriologists read the poem as an explanation, told in story, of things every Sumerian could see. Why do people labour? Because the gods once did, and handed the work on. Why are some people born different? Because a goddess, flushed with beer, made them so, and the wise god found every one of them a place, a role and, in the poem's repeated phrase, daily bread. The man who cannot see becomes a musician; the woman who cannot bear children serves the queen. Beneath the comedy runs a working court, its jobs and its hierarchy. The making itself is told as the work of a potter, with clay kneaded and pinched into shape.\n\nThere is power in the story too. The senior gods supervise and the junior gods dig until they rebel; the contest between Enki and Ninmah ends with one god supreme and the other silenced. A poem about how people were made is also a poem about who gives orders.\n\n## The other reading\n\nZecharia Sitchin, in The 12th Planet, read the same lines as a laboratory record. The six beings, he wrote, were failed attempts at genetic manipulation, made before the gods arrived at a perfect worker, Adapa. Put that way it can sound uncannily modern: the gods' creature is designed, the material is prepared, specialists stand by, the first results are flawed.\n\nThe text pushes back. Ninmah makes her beings after drinking beer, on a bet, not to improve a design. Enki does not discard them; he gives each one a fate and a living. The poem's own climax is Umul, Enki's creation, worse than any of hers. The story's interest is not in perfecting a product but in what a society does with bodies that do not fit.\n\nAnd yet the oldest written answer to the question of why people exist does not say we were made for love, or worship, or to rule the earth. It says we were made from the clay of the deep to carry baskets for tired gods, by a designer who planned the form and helpers who brought it into being. Picture the scene as the poem leaves it: a quiet hall after a feast, a goddess with clay on her hands, and six newly made people standing before a god who looks at each of them in turn and decides what they are for."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX002-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Enki and Ninmah, Paris — Marble cylinder seal, depicting the god of the abyss of fresh water and of wisdom, Enki / Ea, with a heroic figure behin","by":"Zunkir","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sceau_Enki_Agade_MNB1905.jpg","g":false,"ct":false,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"c.1800 BCE","h":"Oldest surviving copy","s":[271]},{"v":"Sumerian","h":"Language","s":[271]},{"v":"AO 7936","h":"Where the physical copy is held","s":[271]}],"hs":{"271":["etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk","https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr112.htm"]}}