Enki/Ea (god)Mischievous god of wisdom, magic and incantations who resides in the ocean under the earth.

Functions

Greenstone cylinder seal TT of thescribe Adda, showing Enki depictedwith a flowing stream full of fish;c.2300-2200 BCE. Enki's two-facedminister Isimu stands to his right.(BM 89115). © The British Museum.View large image on the BritishMuseum's website.

Cylinder seal TT showing Enkiseated on a throne, wearing ahorned headdress with a flowingstream full of fish; 2250 BCE (BM103317). © The British Museum.View large image on the BritishMuseum's website.

Limestone wall relief featuring afish-cloaked apkallu sage TT , fromthe temple of Ninurta in Kalhu,Assyria; 9th century BCE. (BM124573). © The British Museum.View large image on the BritishMuseum's website.

Babylonian limestone kudurru TT depicting a turtle, which was asymbol of Enki; 1125BC-1100 BCE(BM 102485). © The BritishMuseum. View large image on theBritish Museum's website.

Lord of the abzuThe god Ea (whose Sumerian equivalent was Enki) is one of the three most powerful gods in theMesopotamian pantheon, along with Anu and Enlil. He resides in the ocean underneath the earthcalled the abzu (Akkadian apsû), which was an important place in Mesopotamian cosmicgeography. For example, the city of Babylon was said to have been built on top of the abzu.

Sumerian texts about Enki often include overtly sexual portrayals of his virile masculinity. Inparticular, there is a metaphorical link between the life-giving properties of the god's semen andthe animating nature of fresh water from the abzu. Until recently, however, many of the moreexplicit details have been suppressed in modern translations (see Cooper 1989; Dickson 2007).

Incantations, wisdom and cleanersEa has associations with wisdom, magic and incantations. He was a favourite god amongstdiviners TT (bÄ rû) and exorcist priests TT (ašipÅ«) as he is the ultimate source of all ritualknowledge used by exorcists to avert and expel evil. Ea was patron of the arts and crafts, and all

other achievements of civilization. His connection with water meant that Ea was also the patrondeity of cleaners (Foster 2005: 151-152).

Creator and protector of humanityEa is the creator and protector of humanity in the Babylonian flood myth Atra-hasÄ«s and theEpic of Gilgameš. He hatched a plan to create humans out of clay so that they could performwork for the gods. But the supreme god Enlil attempted to destroy Ea's newly created humanswith a devastating flood, because their never-ending noise prevented him from sleeping. Butclever Ea foresaw Enlil's plan; he instructed a sage TT named Atrahasis to build an ark so thathumanity could escape the destruction.

In the myth Adapa and the South Wind, Ea helps humanity keep the gift of magic andincantations by preventing Adapa from becoming immortal (Foster 2005: 525-530; Izre'el 2001;Michalowski 1980).

Ea's creaturesEa was served by his minister, the two-faced god Isimu/Akkadian Usmû (pictured to Enki's rightin Image 1). Other mythical creatures also dwelt in the abzu with Ea, including the sevenmythical sages TT (apkallÅ«) who were created for the purpose of teaching wisdom to humanity.

Divine Genealogy and Syncretisms

Enki was the son of the god An, or of the goddess Nammu (Kramer 1979: 28-29, 43) and a twinbrother of Adad. It is unclear when he was merged with the god Ea, whose name first appears inthe 24th century BCE (Edzard 1965: 56). His wife was Damgalnunna/ Damkina and theiroffspring were the gods Marduk, Asarluhi and Enbilulu, the goddess Nanše and the sage Adapa(Bottéro 2002: 234; Black and Green 1998: 75).

Enki also had sexual encounters with other goddesses, particularly in the Sumerian myth Enkiand Ninhursanga (ETCSL 1.1.1). Ninhursanga gives birth to the goddess Ninmu after sexualrelations with Enki. Later in the myth Enki becomes gravely ill and Ninhursanga then gives birthto eight healing deities in order to cure him. Enki then fathered the goddess Ninkurra with hisdaughter Ninmu, and the goddess Uttu with his granddaughter Ninkurra (Kramer and Maier 1989:22-30).

Cult Place(s)

Enki is associated with the city of Eridu on the southern Mesopotamia. Enki's temple was E-abzu(house of the abzu), which was also known as E-engur-ra (house of the subterranean water) orE-unir (Foster 2005: 643-644).

Time Periods Attested

The first attestations of the god Enki date to the Early Dynastic IIIa period, where he is mentionedin the texts from Fara. As late as the third century BCE he appears as the god Kronos in a Greektext attributed to the Babylonian priest Berossus (BÄ“l-rēʾûšunu) (Kramer and Maier 1989:10).

Enki's role in making Mesopotamian lands fertile and in civilizing its cities is recounted inimportant Sumerian literary texts from the second millennium BCE. Enki and Ninhursanga(ETCSL 1.1.1) describes Enki's role in transformed the land around the salty marshes land ofTilmun (near to Southern Mesopotamia) into fertile, economically productive ground using sweetwater from the abzu (Bottéro 2002: 235-6). Enki and Inana (ETCSL 1.3.1) tells of a fight for powerbetween Enki and Inana, the goddess of sex and war. Inana gets Enki drunk in order to steal thepowers of civilization from him (Black and Green 1998: 76; Kramer and Maier 1989: 15-16; 57-68). Enki's role as a creator of the world is described in Enki and the World Order (ETCSL 1.1.3),

and his creator aspect becomes an increasingly prominent in later literature, a phenomenon thatFrymer-Kensky (1992: 70-90) has called the "marginalization of goddesses".

Later in the second millennium, rituals and prayers to prevent and remove evil frequently invokedEa, Šamaš and Marduk as a group. Ea generally provided the spell, Marduk oversaw itsimplementation and Šamaš provided purification (Foster 2005: 645). Ea also features centrally ina series of royal "bath house: rituals that aimed to restore the king's purity after ominous celestialevents. An exorcist recited incantations to the gods on the king's behalf, whilst the king himselfbathed to wash away evil. (Robson 2010a; Foster 2005: 643-644).

In the Mesopotamian worldview, illnesses and strife were caused by evil demons and divinedispleasure. As Ea was master of the exorcists' ritual knowledge, he often featured in first-millennium incantations performed by exorcists to remove evil or to prevent it from visiting in thefirst place (examples in Foster 2005: 954-992). In one Neo-Assyrian prayer against evil from thecity of Huzirina, a man named Banitu-tereš asks Ea to remove the "evil of ominous conditions(and) bad, unfavourable signs" that are present in his house because he is "constantly terrified"of what will happen (STT 1, 67). Prayers for success in divination and protection of kings alsoinvoked Ea.

Iconography

Ea is depicted in Mesopotamian art as a bearded god who wears a horned cap and long robes.Cylinder seals TT often picture him surrounded by a flowing stream with fish swimming inside itrepresenting the subterranean waters of the abzu [Images 1 & 2]. Others depict him inside hisunderwater home in the abzu, or his E-abzu shrine. (Black and Green 1998: 76; Kramer andMaier 1989: 121-123).

Wall reliefs from Ninurta's temple in the Neo-Assyrian city of Kalhu showing figures cloaked inthe skin of a fish were (incorrectly) assumed to be representations of Ea during the earlytwentieth century. These images actually represent the apkallu sages that dwelt in the abzu withEa, who sometimes took a form that was half-man and half-fish [Image 3].

Ea's symbols include a curved sceptre with a ram's head, a goat-fish TT and a turtle [image 4](Black and Green 1998: 179). The Sumerian poem Ninurta and the Turtle (ETCSL 1.6.3)describes how Enki created a turtle from the clay of the abzu to help him recover the stolen tabletof destinies, which controls humanity's future. The tablet was stolen by an evil bird-like demonnamed Anzu, but the hero Ninurta won it back. Ninurta, however, decided to keep it for himselfrather than return it to Enki. Yet the ever-cunning Enki thwarted Ninurta's ambitions by creating aturtle that grabbed Ninurta by the heel, dug a pit with its claws and dragged the overambitioushero into it. Though the story is incomplete, presumably the tablet was returned to Enki, andNinurta was taught a valuable lesson regarding the corrupting nature of power.

Name and Spellings

Enki is spelled in Sumerian as den-ki or dam-an-ki. In Akkadian, Ea's name is commonly spelleddE2.A but it is unclear to which language this name belonged originally (Edzard 1965: 56). Inliterary texts, Enki/Ea was sometimes known by the alternative names Nudimmud or Niššiku, thelatter originally being a Semitic epithet TT (nas(s)iku "prince") that was then reinterpreted as apseudo-logogram TT dnin-ši-kù (Cavigneaux and Krebernik 1998-2001a: 590). He had anumber of epithets TT , including 'stag of the abzu' (Black and Green 1998: 75) and 'little Enlil'(Foster 2005: 643-644).

Written forms:

Enki: EN.KI-GA.KAM2; d40; d60; dEN.KI; dIDIM (see CAMS online corpus), dnu-dím-mud,

dnin-ši-kù

Ea: dé-a

Normalized forms:Enki, Enkig, Nudimmud, Niššiku, Ea