Epic
Enki and Ninhursag
Anonymous · -2000
Synopsis
In Dilmun, a pure and idyllic land where the god Enki and his wife Ninsikila live, fresh water is lacking. At the goddess's request, Enki makes it spring forth and promises that Dilmun will become a prosperous trading post. He then unites with a goddess, and then with the daughter she bears him, and so on from generation to generation, until Uttu, who first demands gifts. Enki finally tastes the eight plants born of this union and fixes their destiny, which unleashes the anger of the goddess Ninhursag.
Context
The poem, of about two hundred and eighty lines, dates back to the Third Dynasty of Ur; its main manuscripts date from the Old Babylonian period and come from scribal schools. Samuel Noah Kramer produced the standard edition in 1945, and Pascal Attinger a revised edition with French translation in 1984. Attinger reads in it the foundation of the social order on the prohibition of incest, from barren land to prosperity.
Who it is for
A short but fragmentary and difficult text, to be read in an edition annotated by Assyriologists.
Prizes and reception
The myth is one of the most commented-upon Sumerian texts since Kramer's edition, in which he saw a paradise.
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