K Dyckson, Enki and Ninhursag

[
JNES

66 no. 1 (2007)]

2007 by The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved.
002229682007/66010001$10.00.

1

ENKI AND NINHURSAG: THE TRICKSTER IN PARADISE*

KEITH DICKSON, Purdue University
(Only) after you have eaten the bread you have made (?) is its nature decided.
Sumerian proverb

1

I. Introduction

S

ince

its rst published editions and translations early in the last century,

2

the
Sumerian narrative now generally known as Enki and Ninhursag has been at the center
of claims and controversies over the nature of myth and the relations among the myths of
different cultures in the ancient Near East. The present study proposes to review earlier in-
terpretations of the narrative and to suggesttentatively, given the fragmentary nature of the
texts that preserve itless a unied interpretation than a number of different but perhaps
still unied approaches to an understanding of its context and content as myth.

II. Narrative Sequence

A bare summary of the narrative follows, based principally on the edition of Attinger,
on whom (along with others identied in the notes) I rely both for the text and also for the
translation(s) from Sumerian.

3

Given the fact that as recently as 1995 interpretations of the

* Here follows a list of works frequently cited in
this article with their abbreviations:
Alster = B. Alster, Enki and Ninhursag: The Creation
of the First Woman,

Ugarit-Forschungen

10 (1978):
1527.
Attinger = P. Attinger, Enki et Ninhursage,

Zeitschrift
fr Assyriologie

74 (1984): 152.
Bottro and Kramer = J. Bottro and S. Kramer,

Lorsque les dieux faisaient lhomme: mythologie
msopotamienne

(Paris, 1989).
Jacobsen = T. Jacobsen, trans and ed.,

The Harps That
Once . . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation

(New
Haven, 1987).
Kirk = G. Kirk,

Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in
Ancient and Other Cultures

(Berkeley, 1970).
Kramer = S. N. Kramer,

Enki and Ninhursag: A
Sumerian Paradise Myth

(New Haven, 1945).
Lambert and Tournay = M. Lambert and R. Tournay,
Enki et Ninhursag: propos dun ouvrage rcent,

Revue dassyriologie et darchologie orientale

43
(1949): 10536.
Leick = G. Leick,

Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian
Literature

(London, 1994).
Rosengarten = Y. Rosengarten,

Trois aspects de la
pense religieuse sumrienne

(Paris, 1971).

1

B. Alster,

Proverbs of Ancient Sumer

(Bethesda,
1977), p. 11 (= SP 1.26).

2

For bibliography of scholarship prior to Kramers
1945 edition, see E. Weidner,

Die Assyriologie 1914
1922: Wissenschaftliche Forschungsergebnisse in Bib-
liographischer Form

(Leipzig, 1922), nos. 9841012,
and Kramer p. 3, nn. 1, 3. For brief summaries of in-
terpretations since Kramer, see Kirk, pp. 9096; Alster,
pp. 109 f.; Leick, pp. 36 f.; and J. Evers,

Myth and
Narrative: Structure and Meaning in Some Ancient
Near Eastern Texts

(Kevelaer and Neukirchen-Vluyn,
1995), pp. 3537.

3

The standard translations are those of Attinger;
Jacobsen, pp. 181204; S. N. Kramer and J. Maier,

Myths of Enki, The Crafty God

(Oxford, 1989), pp. 22
30; Bottro and Kramer, pp. 15280; and W. Rmer,
Journal of Near Eastern Studies

2
narrative continue to be guided by much older rather than more contemporary readings,

4

some form of synopsis is necessary if only to present a working text on which to base the
discussion that follows. I have divided the summary into several acts, each corresponding
to a different locale in the story.

5

For the most part, this is a division that the text itself ex-
hibits; its justication as an interpretative measure will emerge during the course of the sub-
sequent commentary.

A. City (lines 164)

6

(

A1

) Dilmun is praised as a sacred, pure, bright city. It is a place from which what can be
identied as natural evilspredation by animals, disease, old age, dirtare explicitly absent.
No young girl bathes, no man sails the river, no herald makes his rounds; there is no song
of joy, there is no wailing.
(

A2

) Ninsikila (= Ninhursag) complains to Enki that Dilmun lacks water; its canals are
empty.
(

A3

) Enki makes water well up from the subterranean reservoirs over which he has control.
The wells of Dilmun ll; their saltwater becomes sweet. The furrowed elds produce grain.
(

A4

) Either as an immediate result, or else in the optative form of wish or exhortation,
Dilmun is described as an urban emporium into which ow riches from all over the world
precious wood and stones, minerals, wool, spices, spun cloth. Its dwellings are praised, along
with its grain and dates; its triple harvests are celebrated.

7

B. Marsh (lines 6589)

(

B1

) With his penis, Enki digs channels in the marsh and waters the reedbeds. His penis
bursts out of his clothing (?).
(

B2

) Enki forbids anyone from entering the marsh, then invites Nintu/Ninhursag (?) to sleep
with him there. He copulates with Damgalnuna (?) and Ninhursag. After an accelerated,
nine-day gestation, Nintu/Ninhursag gives birth to Ninsar. The delivery is described as
smooth and painless, as if lubricated with oil.

D. O. Edzard, and O. Kaiser, eds.,

Mythen und Epen 1:
Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments III,3

(Gtersloh, 1993); online resources are available at
the Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://
etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk). B. Alster (Dilmun, Bahrain and
the Alleged Paradise in Sumerian Myth and Literature,
in

Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early
History of Bahrain

[Berlin, 1983], pp. 6165) offers an
edition and translation of the rst sixty-three lines of the
narrative, along with the twenty lines of interpolation
from the so-called Ur version, on which see n. 7 below.

4

Everss 1995 structuralist approach (

Myth and
Narrative

), for instance, seems to be unaware of
Attingers 1984 edition of Enki and Ninhursag, result-
ing in signicant differences in readings and therefore
in the interpretation of the narrative. See also nn. 13
and 47 below.

5

The episodic character of the narrative is obvious,
leading Lambert and Tournay to posit the existence of
six independent narrativesLa lgende de Dilmun,
La legende de lambar, Le mythe du g-d, En-ki
et Uttu, Enki et les huit plantes, Ninhursag et les
huit divinitsthat were at some later point stitched
together by a single poet. Others acknowledge the
divisions but assume a consistent intention throughout
the narrative, which forms the basis for a literary/cul-
tural interpretation of the myth as a whole.

6

I follow the numbering in Attinger.

7

The precise location of this passage of some twenty
lines is problematic. Also at issue is whether the mood
of the verbs is optative or indicative. See Attinger, p. 13,
n. 28.

One Line Short
Enki and Ninhursag: The Trickster in Paradise

3

C. Riverbank (lines 90167)

(

C1

) From the marsh, Enki spies Ninsar on the riverbank. After consultation with his sukkal,
Isimud, Enki travels by boat to dry land and there copulates with Ninsar. After accelerated
gestation, she gives birthlike oilto Ninkura.
(

C2

) From the marsh, Enki spies Ninkura on the riverbank. After consultation with
Isimud, he travels by boat to dry land and there copulates with Ninkura. After accelerated
gestation, she gives birthlike oilto Ninimma.

8

(

C3

) From the marsh, Enki spies Ninimma on the riverbank. After consultation, he travels by
boat to dry land and there copulates with Ninimma. After accelerated gestation, she gives
birthlike oilto Uttu.
(

C4

) Ninhursag warns Uttu about Enki. In a fragmentary passage, she apparently advises
Uttu to demand cucumbers, apples (apricots?), and grapes from Enki as the price for
intercourse.

9

D. Garden (lines 15367)

(

D1

) Enki raises sweet water a second time (cf. A3). A grateful gardener brings Enki
cucumbers, apples (apricots?), and grapes.
E. House (lines 16895)
(E1) Enki goes to Uttus house, having rst made his face attractive.
10
He identies himself
as the Gardener and offers Uttu cucumbers, apples (apricots?), and grapes; in exchange,
Uttu opens her house. Enki thenin a more extended and less formulaic description of
intercoursecopulates with her.
(E2) Uttu experiences pain, presumably during intercourse itself or else, possibly, in the
act of childbirth.
(E3) Ninhursag removes Enkis semen from (within?) Uttus body, and from it (by putting
it within her own body?) produces eight plants.
11
F. Riverbank (lines 196219)
(F1) From the marsh, Enki spies the plants and consults with Isimud about them. Isimud
names each plant, cuts or pulls it from its roots, and gives it to Enki, who eats each in turn.
In this way, Enki knows the heart and determines the destiny of each plant.
(F2) Ninhursag curses Enki, withdrawing her life-giving eye from him. Enki falls ill.
8
A fragment of some twenty lines from an inde-
pendent source identies Ninimma instead as daughter
of Ninkura and Enki, then describes his formulaic
rape of Ninimma, who in turn gives birth to Uttu. See
Attinger, p. 19.
9
Alternatively, it is the gardener from whom Uttu
makes such a demand. See Attinger, p. 21, n. 41 and
p. 23, n. 46.
10
See Attinger, p. 23, n. 44. By contrast, Kramer,
p. 17 (along with Kramer and Maier, Myths, p. 27)
translates his face turned green and glosses (Kramer,
p. 28) as the gardeners action must have displeased
and troubled him in some way.
11
Attinger, p. 25, nn. 48 and 49.
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 4
G. Temple (lines 22050)
(G1) The fox approaches Enlil with an offer to bring Ninhursag back; in return, Enlil
promises it a tree in his city and subsequent fame.
(G2) In a fragmentary passage, the fox adorns itself and approaches Ninhursag, apparently
claiming that it has unsuccessfully approached the other godsEnlil, Nanna, Uttuin their
temples.
(G3) Ninhursag goes to the temple (of Enlil?), where the gods strip her and Enki is put
inside (or before?) her vulva.
H. Vulva (lines 25178)
(H1) Ninhursag asks Enki which part of his body hurts. As he answers, listing a series of
eight partshead, hair, nose, mouth, throat, arm, ribs, sidesshe somehow facilitates the
birth of a series of eight minor deities.
(H2) Each of the eight deities is named as it emerges. An element in each deitys name
puns with the name of a body part mentioned by Enki.
(H3) Enki (presumably) is healed. The narrative concludes with a hymnic formula of
praise for the god.
III. Commentary
(A1A4) City
The description of Dilmun as pure and bright, along with the negative language used
to characterize it as free from certain natural and cultural evils, leads Kramer to accept the
classication of the narrative as a paradise myth.
12
This is of course a loaded choice of
termsa choice already made in Langdons much-awed interpretation of the myth three
decades earlier
13
and certainly also a hermeneutically revealing one. For if the Dilmun
of the narrative is genuinely a paradise, it is perhaps only natural to consider how it stands
related to the Paradise in which Kramer and his audience have the greatest cultural invest-
ment. As Lambert and Tournay are quick to note,
14
the classication is surely motivated to
a large degree by the desire to build upon earlier discoveries of other, more genuine parallels
between Mesopotamian and Hebrew mythsspecically, between the myth of Ziusudra/
Utnapishtim and that of the Flood in Genesis
15
in such a way that the Sumerian story
12
Kramer remains true to this interpretation
throughout his subsequent scholarship on the narra-
tive; see S. N. Kramer, Dilmun: Quest for Paradise,
Antiquity 37 (1963): 11115; Sumerian Mythology,
rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1972), pp. 5459; and Kramer
and Maier, Myths.
13
Compare S. Langdon, A Preliminary Account of
a Sumerian Legend of the Flood and the Fall of Man,
Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 37
(1914): 18896; idem, Sumerian Epic of Paradise, the
Flood and the Fate of Man, Publication of the Baby-
lonian Section, vol. 10, no. 1 (Philadelphia, 1915).
On the egregious errors in Langdons methods and
conclusions, see M. Jastrow, Sumerian Myths of
Beginnings, American Journal of Semitic Languages
and Literatures 33 (1917): 89144itself a chastening
lesson in the fragility of interpretation, since the text
on which he, too, bases his understanding has subse-
quently proved to be just as awed.
14
Lambert and Tournay, p. 122.
15
Ibid. The authors remark: On devine facilement
le but de cette interprtation: il sagit dtablir des
One Line Short
Enki and Ninhursag: The Trickster in Paradise 5
comes to be seen as at least genetically afliated with if not, directly or otherwise, the
authentic parent of the Old Testament account.
16
Among other things, the assumption that
the tale of Enki and Ninhursag is concerned in some principal way to narrate the creation of
and subsequent Fall from Paradise results in a disproportionate focus on certain elements
in the story to the exclusion of manysome would say mostothers. In true hermeneutic
fashion, the initial assumption both guides the direction the investigation takes and at the
same time also closes off other, potentially even more valid, avenues of inquiry. Kramers
attention is drawn in particular to (1) the episode of Enkis watering of Dilmun (A3), with
which he compares the mist that rises from the arid plain in the Yahwist (J) tradition of the
Hebrew account (Gen. 2:6 f.);
17
(2) Enkis eating of the plants (F1) and subsequent fatal
malady, which recalls for him Adams and Eves transgression along with their ensuing
punishment by expulsion into a world of work, labor-pain, and deathNinhursag here
debuting in the role Yahweh later will make famous; and (3) the creation (H2) of a
goddess Nin-ti (Lady of the Rib) in response to the pain Enki feels in his rib (Sumerian
ti), to which Kramer predictably compares the biblical origin of Eve.
18
Lambert and Tournay are among the rst to call attention to the difculty in regarding
the Dilmun of Enki and Ninhursag as a paradise in the Edenic sense. For them, as for the
majority of later scholars, it is clearly less a positive than a negative utopiaa gure of pure
potentiality, a site dormant and in need of activation: le texte donne moins limpression
dun paradis que celle dun monde endormi dans une non-vie: toutes les forces et tous les
tres y sont en puissance et dj en place, mais aucune nexiste vraiment.
19
The language
of this initial description of Dilmun is indeed purely gurative, unfolding by means of vivid,
selective negations to present a sequence of remarkably concrete images of what in fact
entirely lacks all genuine substance. Neither grain nor house nor woman nor animal yet
exists, to pick only one instance, in the world about which the text claims (lines 19 f.) that
no bird in the sky eats the malt a widow leaves out to dry on the roof. Hardly a real place
at alland certainly far from Adams verdant and tangible Paradisethe Dilmun of the
opening scene is at best just a topos, a merely rhetorical space in which the (surprisingly
large) matrix of actions and meanings implied by bird, malt, and widow is only a virtual
one.
20
The images created by the opening series of negative predications conjure up a world
that exists as yet only as prolepsis.
Moreover, and equally far from being a paradisea happy state at the beginning of
things, as Alster neatly denes itDilmun here is most expressly problematic,
21
and it is
indeed as a sequence of problems for which solutions must be found that the narrative as
relations entre la Bible et les rcits les plus anciens
de la Msopotamie; parceque des mythes relativement
plus rcents, ainsi celui du dluge, en ont fourni quel-
quesunes, on est autoris, semble-t-il, en chercher
dans des rcits antrieurs.
16
See Kramers qualication, p. 9, n. 29.
17
Ibid., pp. 102 f.
18
Ibid., p. 9; see also S. N. Kramer, ed. Mythologies
of the Ancient World (Garden City, New York, 1961),
p. 103. Kramer, p. 8, also draws attention to the effort-
lessness of childbirth as index of a prelapsarian world.
19
Lambert and Tournay, p. 123. Attinger, p. 33, con-
curs: Ce passage clbre, considr longtemps comme
la description paradisiaque de Dilmun, dpeint en fait
Dilmun avant lapparition de toute vie. . . . Cf. also
Rosengarten, pp. 9 f., 14 f.; Alster, pp. 21 f. and Dil-
mun, Bahrain, p. 55; and Bottro and Kramer, p. 160.
20
Lambert and Tournay (p. 123) hedge somewhat,
in that they imagine a Dilmun indeed populated with
creatures but creatures who do not yet act: Le lion
ne tuait pas . . . [signie] quiil navait pas encore
commenc tuer, faire son mtier de lion. See also
Alster, pp. 5558.
21
Alster, p. 54.
a whole proceeds. Dilmun may lack the sound of wailing (line 30), but that does not mean
it is free from complaint (lines 3136). Without water to drink and for irrigation, it is une
vaste machine toute mont, mais qui ne tourne pas.
22
This fact alone serves both to exclude
the narrative from the category of paradise myths and to locate it instead within the far
broader (if vaguer) category of myths of origin.
23
Specically, the main issue on which
the tale of Enki and Ninhursag turns is that of the conditions necessary for the creation
and maintenance of a habitable world. It is a myth concerned principally with delineating
certain aspects of the origin of culture.
In response to Ninsikilas complaint, Enki makes water rise up from below, lling the
wells and exchanging saltwater for sweet water. While its transformative effect is described
with reference both to city and countryside, more attention focuses on the urbanization of
Dilmun. A passage of some twenty lines (A4 = UET 6 1) supplied from a source other
than the main Nippur text of the narrative (PBS 10/1.1), represents Dilmun after its irri-
gation as a vast urban center into which ow luxurious goods from around the world.
24
It
is unclear whether the verbs of this passage are to be translated as indicative or optative,
25
making it difcult to determine whether the description is intended as a statement of fact,
an exhortation, or yet another prolepsisin this case now richly afrmativeof a city at the
height of its cultural development. In any instance, Dilmuns metamorphosis is dramatic:
an arid topos delineated strictly in the negative becomes a treasury of precious stones,
woods, cloth, and spices. Barges laden with barley and oil ply the canals; the homes of
Dilmun are beautiful; its barley and famous dates ourish; its harvests come to term three
times each year. The contrast between the two descriptions could not be more forceful: on
the one hand, the almost dreamlike latency and suspended animation of Dilmun before the
waters rise, on the other, a Dilmun seemingly at the hub of commerce, replete with the ne
trappings of culture, and as the apparent destination of all movement in the world.
26
The specic terms of Dilmuns transformation likewise serve to distance it even more
from Adams quiet garden in the east. The latter is strictly precultural, a natural world of
fauna and plush vegetation: no wood is chopped for furniture, no mines dug to extract ex-
pensive minerals and gemstones, no cloth spun or deep wells sunk or splendid homes
erected, no keels laid for ne ships to freight their precious cargo to and fro, furrowing
the waters of the known globe. The Genesis account, on the contrary, situates technology
squarely in the postlapsarian world of labor (both male and female) and eventual death; here
the tool, far from celebrating human control over nature, only conrms human subjection
to it as punishment for disobedience. Alster is surely correct in noting that paradise in
Kramers Edenic sense is in fact quite alien to Sumerianand, for that matter, Mesopo-
tamianthought as a whole, which understands natural, pretechnological existence as
an index of barbarism or savagery rather than bliss and prefers to valorize stable political
authority and technological innovation over biblical innocence and piety.
27
Dilmun, really
22
23
Compare Rosengarten (relying on Eliade), pp. 7 f.:
Les mythes dorigine prolongent et compltent le
mythe cosomogonique: ils racontent comment le Monde
a t modi, enrichi et appauvri. For Alster, p. 59,
the narrative has the status of a creation myth.
24
On the various textual sources for Enki and Nin-
hursag, see Attinger, p. 5.
25
Ibid., p. 13, n. 28.
26
See Alster, Dilmun, Bahrain, on the rich ar-
chaeological evidence supporting the role of ancient
Dilmun (Bahrain) as an international center of trade.
27
See Alster (Dilmun, Bahrain, p. 55), who
remarks: . . . it should be reasonably clear that if by
no paradise at all, is here instead envisioned as a thoroughly urban space, state-of-the-art,
modern, vibrant, and vigorously mercantile. There is no reasonable sense in which Enkis
intervention can be mapped either onto that of the Snake in Adams Garden or onto Adam
himself, and not a single regret attends the metamorphosis his actions bring about. By their
means, Dilmun in fact most triumphantly shifts from its timeless and vacant state of mere
potentiality to full, robust engagement in commerce, history, and time. In the pages that
follow, I will argue that Enki and Ninhursag is a sort of experimental piece of narrative
specically, that it is largely concerned with charting the effects of Enki the Tricksters
passage through one after another of the signicant cultural spaces Sumerian civilization
delineated in the process of organizing and understanding its world. It is doubtless quite
tting that, at the outset, the rst space Enki occupiesonly to contradict and violate it,
very tricksterlike indeedis the one falsely imposed by early scholarship on his myth.
(B1B2) Marsh
The setting, too, now shifts from this urban scape to the Marsh of or around Dilmun.
From a structuralist perspective,
28
this is a categorical as much as a topographical movement,
a shift from culture to nature. Moreover, the different site in turn promotes other possibilities
for how the narrative will unfold: what can and does happen in the City is distinctly dif-
ferent from what can be expected to happen in the Marsh. We move from the City Enkis
waters have created to a place whose waters suggest instead an as yet much less orga-
nized, liminal, and even potentially dangerous world. In the context of the narrative so far,
it initially signals a return to a state homologous with that of the rst scene (A1), as if the
tale had looped on itself and were now beginning anew in a different locale.
29
This in turn suggests that Enkis activities in both scenes should also be viewed as
analogous. What supports the claim that they are similar, if not identical, in function is the
fact that irrigation and sexuality are themselves homologous terms in Sumerian myth. In
Sumerian, as in most traditional cultures, cosmogony and agricultural fertility are generally
understood by analogy to human reproductive acts, thereby making irrigation and inter-
course virtually interchangeable tropes.
30
Although the rst scene in the narrative is not
the term paradise we understand an original happy
state in the beginning of the creation of mankind, then
this term is misleading when used in connection with
Mesopotamian beliefs. The term ought not to be used in
this context at all. According to Mesopotamian thought
it was the ideal ruler, the Sumerian king, who was re-
sponsible for creating a happy and well-organized so-
ciety. The society did not live by innocence and piety,
but by palpable nancial prosperity. The triumphalist
language of the Ur-interpolation (A4) is certainly best
understood in this context. On the celebration of in-
vention in Sumerian literature, see G. Komorczy,
Lobpreis auf das Gefngnis in Sumer, Acta Antiqua
Academiae Scientiae Hungaricae 23 (1975): 15374.
28
See, for example, C. Lvi-Strauss, Structural
Anthropology (London, 1968), pp. 20631. Evers, Myth
and Narrative, offers a consistent, if somewhat rigid,
structuralist reading of the myth.
29
Lambert and Tournay, pp. 124 f., consider this
an entirely independent narrative, in fact, describing an
alternate myth of origin (une autre explication de la
vie); see also Jacobsen, pp. 182 f. For Kirk, p. 95, the
change in venue instead marks a topographical exten-
sion of Enkis domain outward from the city toward
(by the end of the story) the desert.
30
See Kirk, pp. 84107; J. Cooper, Enkis
Member: Eros and Irrigation in Sumerian Literature,
in H. Behrens et al., eds., dumu-e
2
-bub-ba-a: Studies in
Honor of ke W. Sjberg (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 87
89, and also Leick, pp. 21 ff. Jacobsen, p. 183, more
explicitly allegorizes the connection when he notes
that the reeds into which Enki plunges his penis in B1
should probably . . . be understood mythopoeically as
the pubic hairs of the earth mother.
expressly sexual, then, the analogy is nonetheless presumably implied by the description
of Enkis raising of sweet water to ll the cisterns of Dilmun (A3). The erotic nature of his
activity in the present scene (B1) set in the Marsh, in any case, is undeniably overt. If nothing
else, the juxtaposition of scenes makes it that much more likely that the sexual metaphor
is to be understood in the earlier passage, thereby making explicit for us an element in the
rst scene that was probably not very latent at all for the tales original audience.
31
Lambert
and Tournay, by contrast, nd the Enki of this second passage strikingly different from the
god of the rst; they consider the two similar in name alone and completely divergent in
function.
32
It is hard to see any fundamental difference at all between Enki as Lord of
Waters (abzu) and as Primal Parent, however, given the fact that in both cases he is a god
whose uid creates and fosters life,
33
whether or not the language in each instance deploys
explicitly sexual metaphors.
This is not to say that Lambert and Tournay are wrong in noting a clear shift in tone. If
there is any appreciable difference in the descriptions of Enki in these two scenes, however,
it is perhaps best initially characterized as a difference in rhetorical genre, namely, between
high and low representations. The Enki of A14 is a sacral gure in a myth of origin
in which Dilmun undergoes dramatic physical and cultural transformation within the course
of a single day. The solemn and triumphalist language of the passage (A4) supplied by the
text from Ur, implicitly contrasting the merely virtual with the fully vibrant City, reects
back on Enki himself as the one through whose agency the change has been wrought. The
grand sweep of the passage, with its litany of far-off places from which all goods now ow
into Dilmun, conrms the even greater power and majesty of the god responsible for such
a stunning metamorphosis.
In the present passage (B1), on the other hand, it is hard to overlook the perhaps equally
broad sweep of pure burlesque in the description of Enki digging irrigation ditches with his
penis and just as triumphantly plunging it again and again into the Marsh. The contrast is
striking, as is the rhetorical distance, from august to aggressively comic and salacious
from sacred myth to folktale. Enki ploughs the wet ground in plain sight of the birth-
goddess Nintu, thereby incidentally also establishing himself as the rst asher, as Cooper
delightedly notesprobably not the sort of rst Kramer would have wanted to include
in his impressive list of other Sumerian precedents!
34
Literal collides with gural reference
in the terms that describe the gods appearance and behavior here, and (at least among in-
terpreters) the meanings compete with one another for precedence.
35
The detailjust as in
A1is once again vivid and in its own way quite compelling: Enkis clothing grotesquely
31
See Leick on the often neglected sexual dimension
of traditional Sumerian literature.
32
See Lambert and Tournay, p. 124: Seul Enki
revient, mais si dissemblable quil na avec le dieu du
passage prcdent que le nom seul de commun; ce
nest plus le seigneur de leau, mais lengendreur
primordial. . . . See also Jacobsen, p. 183: Even the
identity of the Enki of the rst story with the one of
the second one may not be beyond doubt.
33
On the analogy between water and seminal uid
in Sumerian literature, see J. Cooper, Enkis Member,
and Leick, pp. 2129. Leick, p. 39, makes the double
meaning of the Sumerian sign /a/, denoting sperm as
well as water the foundation of her reading of the
story as a whole.
34
See Cooper, Enkis Member, p. 88 and S. N.
Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts
in Mans Recorded History (1956; Philadelphia, 1981).
35
For a different, but less convincing, view of this
passage, based on a reading that would substitute the
term agency(par) son dresser, cest--dire: par
son action for penis, see Rosengarten, p. 20, n. 3.
One Line Short
bulges at the groin. His erection tears through the fabric in an image that suggests to
Attinger la croissance soudaine de la vgtation
36
but which even more strongly insists
on being understood directly at rst, without allegorical refraction, namely, as a coarse in-
stance of sexual exposure.
37
Cooper and Leick emphasize the bawdy humor in this passage
and likewise draw attention to the raw [and] often violent phallocentric sexuality that char-
acterizes Enki both here and elsewhere in Sumerian literature.
38
This is especially by con-
trast with what is found to be the softer and more sensuous language of Inanna-Dumuzi
poetry, with its primary focus on the vulva.
39
To be sure, Enkis priapism is of course a
gesture simultaneously low and also deeply sacred, given the genuinely religious func-
tion of ritual obscenity in traditional cultures, especially when pressed into the service of
asserting and ensuring fertility. Literal and gurative meanings tend to resolve themselves
quite pragmatically here.
At the same time, these elements of burlesque also serve as clear indices of the presence
of a trickster-gure.
40
Enkis sexual romp in the Marsh is in fact the rst clear indication of
his primary function in Enki and Ninhursag, a prolepsis of the role he will play throughout
the rest of the narrative. It likewise provides an important key to interpretation. This is
because the contrast in generic level and rhetorical tone between scenes A34 and B1
more fundamentally reects a contrast intrinsic to the character of Enki himself, as of all
trickster-gures, between sacred and profane. What indeed identies tricksters in general
tends in fact to be precisely an ambiguity over attribution. How should this gure be char-
acterized, after all, if not as the juxtaposition of opposites? The trickster unites both contrary
and contradictory traitshigh vs. low, august vs. absurd, guileful vs. gullible,
41
benecent vs. malicious, good vs. evil, and so onwhich in turn endows him with
vast creative (and destructive) powers. Two reexes of his character are especially relevant
to an understanding of Enkis behavior in Enki and Ninhursag. First, the tricksters multi-
valent, polysemous, and volatile nature makes him, among other things, an ideal border-
crosser. This is reected here in the degree to which the narrative unfolds within a series
of distinct spacesCity, Marsh, Riverbank, Garden, Threshold, Templeacross whose
boundaries Enki smoothly passes to and fro, whether promoting commerce or initiating
sexual exchanges. It is interesting to note that with few if any clear exceptions, Enki is
the only one who actually moves from place to place in the story. The other gures for the
36
Attinger, p. 15, n. 33.
37
Bottro and Kramer, p. 153, translate as: d-
chirant de son pnis le vtement /qui recouvrait le
giron de la terre! Similar allegorization characterizes
Jacobsens approach as a whole. Note his synopsis of
the myth (p. 184): Water and the foothills, Enki and
Ninhursaga, produce the mountain verdure (Ninnisiga)
which in turn produces the high mountains behind
(Ninkirra), and they, as pasture for sheep, produce the
goddess of weaving, Uttu. . . . On nature allegory and
Jacobsens methodology in general, see Kirk, pp. 8894.
38
Compare the narrative known as Enki and the
World Order, in which Enki ejaculates the Tigris and
Euphrates; and see Cooper, Enkis Member, p. 88,
n. 9, and Leick, pp. 2129 and 4854.
39
See also the studies collected in M. Mindlin et
al., eds., Figurative Language in the Ancient Near East
(London, 1987), and Leick, pp. 9096.
40
On tricksters in general, see N. Brown, Hermes
the Thief (New York, 1947); P. Radin, The Trickster:
A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York,
1956); W. J. Hynes and W. G. Doty, eds., Mythical
Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms
(Tuscaloosa, 1993); and R. Erdoes and A. Ortiz, eds.,
American Indian Trickster Tales (London, 1998). On
Enki as trickster, see Kramer and Maier, Myths, along
with Leick, p. 40.
41
In this context, one wonders whether the epithet
in line 65 (g
stu-ge tuku-a) that Attinger (p. 15, with

p. 37 ad loc.) translates as lintelligent is not itself a
semantic marker of Enki as Trickster.
most part simply inhabit one space or another; each is the merely static occupant of a
single locale.
42
Enki by contrast is dened by his abilityoften embodied in the gure of
his sukkal, Isimudto negotiate passage.
A second important reex of the tricksters character involves his proclivity to cross moral
no less than physical borders. Multivalent and volatile, he is also decidedly perverse. His
conicting traits often mark him as conictedhis own worst enemy, in facta gure
prone stupidly or even willfully to violate taboos and conventions of order and thereby to
suffer the consequences of their transgression. In many myths of origin, for that matter, it
is the tricksters violation of boundaries that for the rst time marks precisely where the
limits are; his excess delineates a cultures moderation. Given the issue of incest in Enki
and Ninhursagto which much scholarly attention has been drawn, especially since Kirks
reading of the myth
43
this latter trait seems to emerge as particularly signicant.
The Marsh is the site of the rst in a sequence of what are, technically speaking, hieroi
gamoi. After forbidding anyone to enterthereby both ensuring privacy and also fullling
the requisite narrative conditions that mark the place as well suited either for tryst or rape
44
Enki invites Ninhursag to mate with him there. The fragmentary nature of this passage has
not always allowed for an especially clear understanding of what happens next, or even with
whom it happens. The issue turns on two separable but related questions: (1) the identity
of Enkis mate and (2) the nature of their intercourse. The rst question stems from the
presence in the text at this point of not one but three names of female deities: Nintu (lines
65, 87), Damgalnuna (lines 74 f.), and Ninhursag (lines 75 f.). The rst and third names
most certainly refer to the same mother-goddess gure. For Lambert and Tournay, the claim
that Enki mates with Ninhursagelsewhere the wife of Enlilserves as an indication of
political rivalries among Sumerian cities and, in particular, a feud by proxy between Eridu
(Enki) and Nippur (Enlil).
45
For Alster, on the other hand, the reference to Damgalnuna,
whom tradition usually assigns to Enki as his main and lawful spouse, introduces a whiff
of adultery and/or sexual deviance that in turn helps fuel an entirely different interpreta-
tion of the story as a whole.
46
It is more than likely the case, howeveras Attinger notes,
though with some reservations
47
that we are dealing with essentially interchangeable
epithets of one and the same divine person.
The related issue of exactly how Enki and Nintu/Damgalnuna/Ninhursag mate should
on this basis be consequently easier to resolve. That he has sexual involvement with all
42
The major exception is the foxanother folktale
border-crosserwho is perhaps a doublet of Enki; see
below.
43
Kirk, pp. 90107.
44
Compare the locale for the rape scene in the
narrative known as Enlil and Ninlil in J. Black et al.,
eds., The Literature of Ancient Sumer (Oxford, 2004),
pp. 102 f., along with Kirk and also Cooper, Enkis
Member, p. 89, n. 12, who claim (with perhaps too
much condence) that Enkis multiple rapes of his
young offspring here provide the model, both in terms
of theme (rape of young girls, aquatic setting, use of
boat, initial violation of prohibition) and phraseology,
for Enlils rape of Ninlil in Enlil and Ninlil. See also
Leick, pp. 32 ff.
45
For criticism of this interpretation, see Rosen-
garten, pp. 2022.
46
See Alster, p. 17: When the text states that he
lets ow the semen of Damgalnunna, otherwise known
to be his wife, the point is certainly to tell that he is
doing something unnatural. This understanding in turn
fuels an interpretation of the narrative that is somewhat
difcult to follow but that hinges on the claim that
Ninhursag steals Enkis semen; essentially the same
interpretation is assumed in Alster, Dilmun, Bahrain,
pp. 5559. See also Leick, p. 36.
47
See Attinger, p. 38: Nous admettons, non sans
hsitation, que Nintu/Damgalnuna/Ninhursaga ne sont,
dans ce texte, que dautres noms de Ninsikila. . . .
Bottro and Kramer (pp. 160 f.) assume that the
mate is Damgalnuna, with the other names serving as
epithets.
threewhether individuals or a unityis clear from the statements that Enki waters Dam-
galnuna (line 74) and pours out his semen into Ninhursags lap, which receives it (lines 75 f.);
this later (lines 87 f.) results in Nintus giving birth to Ninsar, the rst in a series of children
with whom Enki will mate in turn. On the assumption that Damgalnuna/Ninhursag/Nintu is
a single female triply named, there would be no problem at all, even though Rosengartens
attempt to account for the three names in terms of a chronological sequence of stages or
functionswife, earth-mother, birth-goddessthrough which Enkis mate passes might
seem a little strained.
48
Where major differences arise is in Alsters claim that what happens in the Marsh is not,
strictly speaking, heterosexual at all. He argues that Enkis act in B2 is still (as perhaps in
B1) one of masturbation, namely, that he rst ejaculates into the Marsh and that Ninhursag
subsequently collects his semen and with it impregnates herself. This is one element in
an argument to the effect that the true aim of the narrative is to explore the paradoxical
beginning of sexual relations,
49
in whose initial stage an abnormal reversed order
(line 17) prevails, with Ninhursag playing the male role and Enki (one assumes) the
female. It would take us too far aeld to address Alsters thesis in detail.
50
Three points,
however, should sufce to suggest some problems with respect to the present issue of
whether or not Enkis sexual relations with Ninhursag are what he calls normal. First,
as against Alsters claim that Ninhursag violates [Enkis] prohibition against entering
the Marsh, line 73 (in Attingers construction) has Enki issue a direct invitation to the
goddess to join him there;
51
the earlier ban on trespassing would in this case apply to all
but the one whom Enki now proceeds to invite. Next, the language used to describe their
sexual act (lines 7576) is formulaically repeated in all the subsequent (three or four)
occasions of intercourse in the narrative, that is, between Enki and his own offspring.
Why in those latter cases the unions should be normatively heterosexual and only here an
abnormal, extravaginal emission followed by self-implantation is unclear and apparently
contradictory.
52
Finally, Attingers remark that the grammar of line 75 precludes reading
Ninhursag as an agentnamely, as the one who allegedly steals Enkis semenmakes
at least this part of the thesis unsupportable.
53
In the absence of hard evidence otherwise, it
is perhaps safest and simplest to assume that what occurs in B2 is a normal hieros gamos,
resulting in the conception and subsequent birth of Ninsar.
Nintus birthing is described as effortless, smooth as oil. This set of lines, repeated
verbatim in the description of the later two (or three) acts of childbirth (C13), serves for
48
Her argument (Rosengarten, pp. 2022) recalls
the suggestion of Lambert and Tournay (p. 125, n. 1)
that the different names marquent . . . des temps par-
ticuliers dans la vie de la desse. See also Attinger,
p. 39.
49
Alster, p. 19.
50
The issue of sexual reversals also gures promi-
nently in Kirks 1970 reading, as well as in that of
J. Evers, Myth and Narrative, which leans heavily on
Kirk. On Alsters 1978 interpretation (presented again
in Alster, Dilmun, Bahrain, pp. 59 f.), see Leick,
pp. 34 f.
51
See Attinger, p. 38 ad loc. The alternate con-
struction he cites (attributed to Wilcke), in which the
statement is taken to be declarative rather than an in-
vitation, nonetheless still assumes that Enki mates with
the goddess. J. Evers, Myth and Narrative, pp. 38 f.,
likewise takes Enkis statement to be prohibition, not in-
vitation. It should be noted that Evers relies on Kramers
text and translations in J. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near
Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 2d ed.
(Princeton, 1955); Attingers 1984 edition is apparently
unknown to him.
52
Cooper, Enkis Member, pp. 88 f., follows
Alster in claiming that Enki releases his semen into
the water for Ninhursag to take into her womb herself.
53
Attinger, p. 39 ad loc.
Kramer as additional ground for the claim of afliation between Enki and Ninhursag and
Genesis, at least inasmuch as chief among the punishments Eve suffers is its precise opposite
(Gen. 3:16). The relation between the two narratives is lopsided, however, and the argument
therefore not entirely sound, since symmetry would imply painless birth in Eden before
the Fall and for that matter, sexual intercourse, conception, and pregnancy as well. While
rejecting that specic thesis, most other commentators still take this formulaic statement
as an index of a prelapsarian world
54
or at least of the privilegesincluding an accelerated
period of gestationthat female deities enjoy over female mortals.
55
Whatever its com-
parative value, the signicance of painless birth within the narrative as such comes mainly
from its contrast with two later episodes in which pain is prominently featured. In the rst
passage (E2), Enkis own (great-) great-granddaughter Uttu suffers either during intercourse
or else immediately after the god has sex with her. She cries out (line 186), naming her
thighs, body, and belly/womb as sources of discomfort. In the second and analogous episode
(H1), it is Enki himself who, after eating the eight plants that indirectly or otherwise issue
from intercourse with Uttu, experiences various pains; here, too, specic body parts are
named. I will deal with these two scenes below.
Of nal note with respect to this episode is its afrmation of Enkis power to bring life
into being, which is understood primarily as male sexual potency.
56
If, in its most general
terms, the overall theme of Enki and Ninhursag is to explore a number of aboriginal changes
(for better or worse) wrought by the god, these rst two episodes must surely be regarded
as homologous. Despite the difference in locale, both scenes depict a male potency which,
like the waters that embody it, easily crosses boundaries to work its effects. In the rst (A3),
Enki/water/semen rises up from below, from deep in the abzu within or underneath the earth;
in the second (B12), the movement now comes from the opposite direction, as Enki/water/
semen ows down into the earth (Ninhursag) it will fertilize. In either case, from below or
above, and in urban space or the raw, uncultivated Marshes, his effects are transformative.
Despite the difference in rhetorical level, moreover, both scenes are celebratory and tri-
umphalist. Enki as master of spaces is also the master of powers and processes that
change them dramatically. The tale of Dilmuns metamorphosis into an urban center is to
be sure more self-contained. It reaches a closure in A4 that could allow it to stand alone as
a short, independent narrative, and it is only Enkis presence in the rst two scenes of Enki
and Ninhursag, along with the analogy between his activities in both episodes, that helps
us make the passage from City to Marshland.
57
The second episode (B12) enjoys no such
closure, however, since intercourse with Nintu/Damgalnuna/Ninhursag and the birth of
Ninsar are only the prelude to other narrative sequences. Like the uid power he sym-
bolizes, Enki spills over into subsequent venues.
(C1C4) Riverbank
The site for the next series of actions is a liminal one. If A14 is set within the City, and
B12 in the Marshes, the next scenes (C14) unfold as a repetitive series of lateral move-
54
See Alster, p. 17, and Dilmun, Bahrain, p. 59.
55
See Lambert and Tournay, pp. 125 f., and Rosen-
garten, p. 22.
56
See Leick, pp. 2129.
57
Lambert and Tournay, p. 124: Tout ce passage,
lignes 1464, forme donc un tout complet dune par-
faite unit; unit daction: il sagit dveiller le monde
la vie; unit de lieu: la scne se passe Dilmun; trois
personnages interviennent: Nin-Sikil, Enki et son ser-
viteur Utu. See also Jacobsen, pp. 182 f.
One Line Long
ments back and forth between two different spaces, as well as a series of encounters at the
point at which both spaces intersect. The scene of the main action is set on the Riverbank,
itself a threshold marking out the boundaries between marsh and dry land, wilderness and
habitable space, and even between different kinds of locomotionsailing (Enki) vs. walking
(female offspring)appropriate to each locale. If the worlds of culture (City) and nature
(Marsh) are contrasted through an abrupt narrative shift between the rst two scenes of
Enki and Ninhursag, as I suggested above, the site of that juxtaposition (Riverbank) is pre-
cisely the venue for this third string of episodes. Here Enki emerges clearly as the border-
crossing trickster, at the same time as the metaphors for spatial transition, sexual intercourse,
and possibly moral transgression, tooall genuine forms of commerce, be it notedoverlap
and indeed converge on one another.
It is spatial contrast that is emphasized at the outset by the formulaic lines (lines 89 f. =
109 f. = C3 f.) that begin each narrative string (C1, C2, C3), locating one after another of
Enkis female offspring on the bank of the river while Enki himself lies in the reeds
within the marsh. Their physical separation in fact calls for a way to negotiate the
distance, and this is supplied in two distinct, but functionally identical, forms. First, the
opening formula continues with the introduction of Enkis sukkal, Isimud. His appearance
here and at F1 but in no other scene in Enki and Ninhursag has been taken as further evi-
dence that the entire narrative itself is perhaps a series of independent tales with no strong
intrinsic relation to each other.
58
On the other hand, Isimuds presence also serves to draw
attention to the theme of (physical, sexual, moral) border-crossing that runs throughout
Enki and Ninhursag. The vizir is a mediator and facilitator; his role is precisely to execute
Enkis will by supplying the means for its enactment. This is, of course, the job of all divine
ministers in Sumerian myth, but in the case of Isimud that role seems to be especially
appropriate. The two-faced sukkal is in a certain sense the expression of Enkis character
as trickster: Janus-like, Isimud is ideally suited as a go-between to represent the tricksters
own ambivalent nature. To Enkis rhetorical questions as the god spies each woman in
turn, Isimud provides not only the predictably afrmative answerscouched in double
entendre
59
but also the boat on which Enki travels over the Marsh. Like Isimud himself,
the boat he pilots is a gure of mediation, the means of transit between two spaces, and its
phenomenal speedwith one step he was on the boat, with the other he stepped on dry
land (lines 98 f. = 118 f. = C11 f.)speaks to the facility with which Enki/Isimud crosses
boundaries.
The densely formulaic character of the episodes (C13) that follow, detailing Enkis
serial rapes of his offspring at the Riverbank, is worth some comment.
60
Generally speak-
ing, formulaic repetition in traditional narratives tends to serve two main classes of func-
tions, depending on whether we view it from outside or inside the narrative.
61
From the
58
See n. 57 above.
59
See Leick, p. 33. Leick reads the reference to
Enkis reaching out from the marsh as double en-
tendre for his erection and also nds sexual play in the
reference to boat and foot.
60
I use the term rape advisedly, as a kind of
shorthand for intercourse initiated by one partner
without any apparent willingness on the part of the
other; in context, it need not necessarily imply moral
transgression. See Leick, p. 51: The concept of rape
is inappropriate here since these myths are not con-
cerned with social customs and institutions but portray
the activities of deities in a world largely devoid of
human regulations.
61
On formulaic language in general, see, for ex-
ample, J. Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to
Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1991), esp. pp. 137, and R. Finnegan, Oral
Poetry: Its Nature, Signicance and Social Context
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1992).
outside, that is, at the level of narrative composition, it is simultaneously a structuring and
a mnemonic device; it facilitates the initial construction and later transmission of the narra-
tive in performative contexts. Within the narrative itself, on the other hand, repetition serves
any number of rhetorical ends. Repeated lines or scenes establish patterns that can be used
to emphasize an issue, to endow a statement or action with an authority that comes from the
use of what are felt to be traditional or archaic modes of expression, to create expectations
that are subsequently either fullled or contradicted later in the story, and so on. The latter
category of uses includes repetition that draws attention to a problem, for instance, by a
narrative that (as often happens in folktale) takes the form of a series of false starts or un-
successful attempts. The problem traps the narrative in a kind of closed circle in which
it endlessly loops until an agent or event intervenes from somewhere outside the looping
action to break the cycle. Without suggesting either that this list is comprehensive or that
these various ends are mutually exclusive ones, it seems most likely that the repeating epi-
sodes in C13 belong to this last category, that is to say, that they serve to highlight an issue
as problematic.
Enkis rapes indeed form a recursive loop. In the Nippur version of the story, he mates
with two of his offspringNinsar (C1) and Ninkurra (C2)in this way; a text of unknown
provenance (C = TCL 16 62) includes an additional episode (C3), inserting Ninimma
between Ninkurra and Uttu and thereby making Uttu his great-great-granddaughter.
62
The
pattern could presumably be further extended, if need be, to accommodate any number of
children in need of genealogy. Its closed nature is critical for an understanding of these
three or four episodes, as well as for the story as a whole. Structurally, both the narrato-
logical and, as it were, the genealogical shape of Enkis matings is viciously cyclical, not
linear. In particular, the formula of accelerated gestation (lines 7788 = 1038 = 12327;
cf. C 1 f. = C 1628) following each mating contributes to an odd sense of narrated time as
proceeding through a series of rapid skips to precisely the same place and moment again
in each case. This is especially true insofar as the interval between the birth of each of the
daughters and her arrival at sexual maturity has also been so breathtakingly compressed
that it is virtually imperceptible. Where the text is not lost or obscured by the presence of
overlapping versions, each girls birth is immediately followed by the formulaic line (89 =
109 = C3) indicating her appearance at the Riverbank, fully grown and now nubile bait for
Enkis lust. This conation of spatial and temporal registersthe fact that arrival at the
Riverbank and arrival at maturity coincide in the textimplicitly characterizes the space
of the Riverbank as a site for sexual encounter.
Moreover, there is a strong sense in which, given the circular pattern of the narrative,
the offspring of the rapesNinsar, Ninkurra, Ninimma, Uttuare not really distinct from
one another but instead functionally identical, inasmuch as the story in each case simply
returns to its beginning and repeats itself rather than moving forward. This would mean that
there are, technically, no true offspring at all, namely, that none of the sexual relations
has any genuine issue in the sense of offspring that perpetuate a true line of descent through
the subsequent course of timeand this because the time-signature of the episode is not
linear at all but cyclic instead. Despite the texts apparent claim to the contrary, each act
62
Attinger, p. 5. See also Leick, p. 34, for parallels
between this scene and an episode in the narrative
Enlil and Ninlil.
of mating does not lead to conception and birth but, rather, to the very same act of mating
all over again. Narratologically, Enki is spinning his wheels, stuck in a rut. The futility of the
cyclethe fact that it takes the form of a potentially endless series of sexual encounters
without offspringmay be intended to present a deliberate, iconic image of the incestuous
nature of these encounters. There is neither narrative nor genealogical movement here
because the (genetically and temporally) distinct categories of offspring and mate, child
and parent have been collapsed into each other. No child comes from each sexual act, just
yet another potential mate, another female whose status as Enkis daughter is forfeited to
his desire to have her sexually.
63
In one sense, this potentially endless repetition of course
conrms his role as border-crosser by emblematizing the act itself of interchangespatial,
sexual, moralover which he presides. In another sense, however, it undercuts precisely that
role by representing the exchange as a fruitless cycle, in constant movement but without
any genuine advance.
The cycle is broken (C4) by the intervention of Nintu. Here the text is again fragmentary,
making it difcult to reconstruct precisely what the goddess says to Uttu; in turn, both the
speaker and addressee of the lines (lines 148 ff.) that resume after the break are also un-
certain.
64
However the lacuna is resolved, what seems reasonably clear is that Nintus advice
is for Uttu to demand a gift of various fruitspresumably from Enki, though this, too, is
not explicit in the textbefore agreeing to have intercourse. Kirk focuses on the specic
content of the proposed gift and understands the passage as a strategic move on the part of
Nintu/Ninhursag to lure Enki into further extending himself (= his irrigating water) beyond
the Marsh and into the desert in order to create more arable land.
65
It is not unlikely that Enki
could be fooled; in this context, we need recall that the trickster in traditional narratives is
just as often the dupe as the agent of guile. Alster in turn draws attention to the role of
gifts, especially of various fruits, in courtship rituals, and suggests that this amounts to a
decent way to approach a woman, not just by raping her.
66
These arguments of course to
some degree complement each other, and while it is probably dangerous to lapse too far into
allegorical interpretationas does Kirk, and to a far greater extent Jacobsen, Lambert and
Tournay, and Rosengarten
67
what indeed emerges from this episode is the fact of Nintus
manipulation of rape into something that more closely approximates an equal exchange of
goods. For the rst time, a kind of sexual economy is established. Thanks to Nintus advice,
masturbation (? cf. B1) and rape (C13)the immediate gratication of (male) desireare
now replaced by a less direct, but institutionally more stable, means of satisfaction, that is,
the purchase of sex.
(D1) Garden
This purchase in turn requires further cultivation of nature. By another act of irrigation,
Enki again brings sweet water/semen up to produce one more distinct place in the narrative
63
See Alster, p. 20: . . . the world is still abnormal
in that the creator can only beget children in incest re-
lations with his own daughters. In a way we return to
the original state of things as the creator swallows his
own offspring, thus again creating a paradoxical unity
of unity and binarity.
64
Kramer, pp. 60 f.; Lambert and Tournay, p. 128;
65
Kirk, p. 95.
66
Alster, p. 18.
67
See Jacobsen (with n. 37 above); Lambert and
Tournay, p. 123; Rosengarten, pp. 2325.
that of the Garden.
68
This new locale is no less important despite the minimal narrative
space that is devoted to it, which is no doubt due partly to the fragmentary nature of this
section of the text.
Reference to Enkis raising water a second time (line 153) expressly recalls the earlier
passage (A3) in which the same feat brought about the dramatic transformation of Dilmun.
A number of analogies link the two episodes. Most conspicuously, the use of which the
fruits of the Garden are to be putnamely, as barter for sex
69
recalls the far more elaborate
economy of urbanized Dilmun after Enkis rst irrigation. Both passages (A4 and C4), it
should be noted, are built around the detailed enumeration of commodities for exchange.
Whereas the Dilmun of A4 is a City in which the importation of goods seems to be em-
phasized, however, the Garden is a site in which the focus is chiey on the production of
goods meant to export, so to speak. Cucumbers, apples (or apricots?), and grapes feed an
economy in which sex, too, is now commodied.
Some sort of fruitful exchange would in fact seem to be part of the solution to the problem
delineated in episodes C13, in which a recursive loop trapped both Enki and the narrative
in a circle of incestuous rape. By channeling Enkis sexuality into a different kind of cycle,
Nintu redirects and transforms it at the same time as she helps effect the transformation of
arid space into a productive garden. The new economic cycle is one in which the cultivation
of the earthalways at least implicitly sexualnow yields as its genuine offspring fruit
that are in turn used as barter for sex that is presumably no less fruitful. Like Dilmun the
City, Dilmun the Garden is at the center of a network of production and exchange.
Moreover, it is also worth noting that the number of participants in this new economy
has grown. No longer is it simply a relation between Enki and one or another of his female
offspring as sexual objects, with Isimud less a distinctly individuated go-between than an
expression of Enkis own role as border-crossing trickster. C4D1 instead now present a
triangulated relation, in which Nintu plays the role of broker between Enki and Uttu and
the Gardener is either a facilitator or else, possibly, even a rival to Enkis desirethereby
forming a more familiar romantic triangle, as I suggest below. Finally, triangulation also
characterizes the curious sexual relations among Enki, Uttu, and Ninhursag in the following
episode.
(E1E3) House
Nintus advice in C4, making sexual access to Uttu conditional on Enkis payment of
a kind of bride-price, calls to mind other narratives in which conditions are set for
marriage and suitors then compete to fulll them. In this context, reference is generally
made to the group of epithalamian songs that goes under the name of The Courtship of
Inanna and Dumuzi.
70
Here Dumuzi the shepherd prevails over Inannas initial preference
68
On the garden in Sumerian literature, see Leick,
pp. 7375, 121 f., and references.
69
See Cooper, Enkis Member, and especially
W. G. Lambert, Devotion: The Languages of Religion
and Love, in Mindlin, ed., Figurative Language,
pp. 2539, on metaphors of fruit in erotic language in
Mesopotamian literature.
70
See Lambert and Tournay, pp. 128 f., and Attinger.
For a critical edition of the songs, see Y. Sefati, Love
Songs in Sumerian Literature: Critical Edition of the
Dumuzi-Inanna Songs (Ramat-Gan, 1998). Leick, p. 34,
n. 18, notes the folktale signature of this theme; see
also her treatment of bridal songs, pp. 6489.
for the Gardener Enkimdu by promising to better the latters gifts one for one. It is less than
likely that this familiar, folktale pattern of conict between rivalswhether for marriage
or patrimonyis operative at the surface of the Enki and Ninhursag narrative, if for no
other reason than that the lacuna in which it should t (some 1015 lines, in Attingers re-
construction) is probably too small to accommodate it in its full-blown version. At the same
time, however, there is no reason not to think that its presence as part of the broad back-
ground of oral and textual traditions might nonetheless be implicit here. Given the frag-
mentary nature of the text at this point, all but the most conservative interpretations are
tentative at best. Yet if Attinger is correct in assigning to Uttu (not Nintu) the speech in
progress after the lacuna (lines 148 ff.), in which a female voice asks for various fruits to
be brought to her, and also in identifying the Gardener (not Enki) as its addressee,
71
Enkis
subsequent impersonation of the Gardener in D1 (lines 171 f.) could indeed suggest just
such a triangulated folktale pattern. The contrast between the two typesthe cultivated
Gardener vs. Enki the rampant marshland suitor, both vying for sexual access to Uttu
certainly resembles the class opposition on which the rivalry between Enkimdu and
Dumuzi is structured in the Inanna poems. At any rate, Enkis behavior in C13 clearly
marks him as the boorish, uncouth, violent loverthe stalker and rapist, in factwith
which his bearing and initial comportment in E1 both stand in strong contrast. Here he
now appears at Uttus door made up, as it looks (line 168),
72
with cosmetics and bearing
an armful of fruit, just like a rened suitor. One way or another, thanks to Nintus inter-
ventions, Enki has become acculturated. The trickster has been tricked.
Or at least it would seem that way. Enkis impersonation of the Gardener is itself a
tricksters act, after all. In this context, the role of cosmetics may just as likely be one of
disguise as of adornment. In the absence of textual evidence, it is impossible to determine
with certainty whether his impersonation belongs to the narrative pattern of rivalry, that is,
whether Enki has in fact just cheated the Gardener out of enjoying what would have been
the metaphorical fruits of his labor. The trick clearly does seem to take some advantage of
Uttu, however, at the same time as it helps Enki negotiate another border-crossing. In re-
sponse to his false identication, Uttu opens the door and leads him across the threshold
into a new and distinctly cultural space. The House of Uttuor more likely, of Nintu/Nin-
hursag, in which Uttu resides as the youngest daughteris a site of implicitly ritualized
social behaviors. As we see, access is gained through a choreography of gestures and formal-
ities that initially sublimate sexual desire: role-playing, decoration of the body, formulas
of question and answer (lines 171 f.),
73
the offering of gifts, and possibly also the institu-
tion of a shared meal.
74
Unlike the Riverbank, the House is the space of institutionalized
(not impulsive) sexual exchangeof proper courtship, not rape.
75
71
Attinger, pp. 21, n. 41; 22, n. 46.
72
Ibid., p. 23, n. 44, with references.
73
Note what appears to be a similar ritual in the
broken section of the text (lines 159 f.), where the
Gardener asks Enki his name.
74
Jacobsens translation (p. 199) includes beer on
the menu, an item lacking in Attinger. If Jacobsen is
correct, this would suggest not only another Sumerian
rstspecically, date rapebut also, and more im-
portantly, another instance (along with the fruits of the
Garden) of a product whose appearance in this episode
speaks to the issue of the acculturation of nature.
75
On the narrative patterns for courtship in Sumerian
literature, see Sefati, Love Songs, esp. pp. 102 ff.
Jacobsen, p. 199, n. 22, observes: The symbolic act
that concluded a Sumerian marriage consisted in the
bride opening the door to the groom who was bringing
the specied wedding gifts. It was followed by the
consummation of the marriage and a wedding banquet
the next morning.
Despite uncertainties in establishing and interpreting the passage E12, it seems clear
that Enki to some extent violates the cultural conventions he has used in order to gain
entrance to the Houseas usual, the trickster conrms the limits by transgressing them.
Once inside, and after his offering of fruits, the god is at rst warmly greeted by Uttu; the
text makes no mention of whether or not she becomes aware of his true identity or even
whether this is a signicant issue at all. In any case, the courtship quickly turns to seduc-
tion, arousal, and, perhaps, some form of sexual mistreatment or abuse. This would appear
to make the best sense of Uttus presumably unpleasant experience in lines 186 f. For after
a somewhat more explicit account of sexual activity than is found in the earlier rape episodes
(C13)specically, of prolonged foreplay (lines 17983) leading to formulaic intercourse
(lines 184 f.)the anticipated, equally formulaic description of accelerated pregnancy and
childbirth smooth as oil is conspicuously absent. In this case, sex with Enki leads not to
easy birth but instead to pain: Uttu cries out (line 186) and identies her thighs, body, and
belly/womb as sites of discomfort. The cause of her pain is not immediately clear. On the
one hand, Attinger draws attention to the play on words in this passage between Sumerian
/a/ (ah! hlas!) and // (bras; force),
76
noting Enki a certainment abus dUttu.
77
If this
is the case, we would have (yet another) violent scene of rape in which Uttu is victimized
despite the initial presence of the somewhat more cultured gestures of foreplaythough
for some reason with more brutality than her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother
were.
78
Enkis transformation was only an apparent one, then; the suave suitor is the trickster
rapist in disguise.
On the other hand, strong expectations established by the formula employed four times
in the earlier episodes would suggest her pain is related somehow to conception, since it
comes immediately after Enkis sexual release. In the corresponding passages (line 77 =
103 = 123 = C17), the rst day/month of pregnancy follows directly upon consummation
of the act (lines 75 f. = 101 f. = 121 f. = C15 f.) and leads smoothly to pregnancy and birth.
In Uttus case, however, we have instead these expressions of painAh! my thighs! Ah!
my body! Ah! my belly/womb!after which Ninhursag takes Enkis semen from Uttus
thighs, and eight plants somehow arise thereafter. The text is unclear whether Ninhursag
herself is also the maternal agent responsible for the plants gestation or whether they
somehow spontaneously or intransitively come into being.
79
In one sense, her intervention
only complicates interpretation of the passage as a whole by making what should be a binary
relation instead triangular. Given the formula indicating Uttus insemination (line 185; cf.
76 = 102 = 122 = C16), are we supposed to assume that she conceives? The fact that Uttu
quickly disappears from the story at this point, and that no explicit statement ever links
76
77
Kramer and Maier, Myths of Enki, p. 28, translate
these lines as Oh, the power [in my] body! Oh, the
power inside! Oh, my power on the outside! but remark
(n. 24) that, If it could be assumed that the of our
text is a variant writing of a, the rendering of the line
would read: Uttu, the fair lady, says Oh, my loins,
says Oh, my outside! Oh, my inside, which would
indicate that Enkis semen had made Uttu ill in some
way. Compare Jacobsen, p. 200: Woe, my under-
belly! Woe, my outsides! Woe, my innards! Bottro
and Kramer, p. 157, translate: Oh! mes cuisses! Oh!
mon corps! Oh! mon coeur. Leick, p. 35, n. 20 (with
which cf. Bottro and Kramer, p. 161), remarks: the ex-
clamation is homophonous with a, sperm, water.
[Uttu] may well have received a surfeit of the latter,
which now covers now only her insides but also her
outside and thighs.
78
This interpretation might also raise the question
of the exact sense of the phrase in line 178, descriptive
of Uttu, which Attinger translates as battre les mains.
He speculates (p. 43 ad 178) whether it might be a
geste exprimant la joie.
79
Attinger, p. 25, n. 49, with commentary ad loc.
her to the eight plants as genetrix to offspring, would suggest she does not;
80
and this in turn
might lend apparent strength to the claim that Ninhursag (line 187) removes Enkis semen
from within Uttus body and with it somehow impregnates herself.
81
Attingers edition and
commentary seem to have denitively laid the rst part of that argument to rest, however;
for it is apparently by wiping, not extraction, that his semen is displaced.
This does not rule out transplantation as a relevant procedure, though, and the other half
of the argument in fact has some merit. However one wishes (or dares) to picture what is
meant literally to happen in E23, it is at least certain that here, tooin keeping with the
four prior episodesintercourse (of some kind) is followed by conception (of some sort)
and birth (in the broad sense of coming-to-be). How the three characters stand related to one
another in the present episode is the issue on which much turns. This is certainly a different
kind of triangulation from that of Enki, Uttu, and the Gardener in the earlier episode (E1).
Scholars throughout the history of the interpretation of Enki and Ninhursag have felt com-
fortable linking Enkis later eating of the eight plants (F1) to the Greek myth of cannibal
Kronos in the Hesiodic version;
82
it is odd that none seems to have looked in the same
general direction for comparanda to help make better sense of the sexual triangle Enki/Uttu/
Ninhursag. For at least in its overall structure, the narrative in which birth results from a
single males sexual contact with two different femalesone young, one old; one virgin, one
sexually experienced; and both related across three or four matrilineal generationsbears
striking resemblance to the Greek myth of the birth of Erikhthonios, the Athenian dynastic
founder who enjoys the rare privilege of descent from a trio rather than a simple pair of
parents.
83
The similarity is especially notable given the fact that in both cases the mnage
trois is accomplished by means of the displacement of semen. In the Greek myth, too, a
clumsy rape leads to strange bedfellows. In the course of struggling (Gk. eris) in a botched
attempt to force himself upon the constitutionally asexual Athene, the god Hephaistos ex-
citedly ejaculates on her thigh. She wipes off the semen with a piece of wool (erion) and
throws it on the ground (khthn), thereby impregnating the ancient earth goddess Gaia
her great-grandmotherwho then gives birth to the paronomastic Erikhthonios: the Struggle-
Wool-Earth Child. One of the numerous issues that motivate the Athenian myth is the need
to claim descent from Athene without thereby compromising her famous virginity. The
mechanism of premature ejaculation effects precisely that; while the wiping of semen from
her virgin thighs and its transfer to another female better able to bear issue in turn enlist
the participation of the Earth Mother herself in the acts of conception, gestation, and birth.
In all this, Athene gets to have it both ways, so to speak, as both the mother of the Athenian
dynastic line and also, perpetually, a virgin.
80
For Leick, p. 35, Uttu does not conceive; this is
despite Leicks claim (p. 280, n. 20) that Uttu is indeed
lled to overow with Enkis sperm.
81
Attinger, p. 25, n. 48. On the differing view,
see Alster, p. 18, where the argument seems self-
contradictory: [Ninhursag] succeeds in picking up
the semen from Uttus thighs, and, apparently, spreads
it on the ground. . . . This is the reversed order from
what happened when [i.e., B2] originally the mother
goddess picked his semen up from the water. This time
it is he who pours it into someone, and she who takes
it out. See also Jacobsen, p. 184; Bottro and Kramer,
p. 157; and Evers, Myth and Narrative, p. 37. It is hard
to see how the text (at least in Attingers recension)
supports his view.
82
See Lambert and Tournay, p. 130; Kirk, pp. 95 f.;
Alster 1978; and Cooper, Enkis Member, pp. 20 f.
83
For the text, see Apollodorus Library 3.14.6
(translation in R. Hard, Apollodorus: The Library of
Greek Mythology [London, 1997], pp. 132 f.), along
with the elegant analysis of the myth by J. Peradotto,
Oepidus and Erichthonius: Some Observations on
Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Order, Arethusa 10
(1977): 24558.
Knowing less about what specically motivates the scene in E2and perhaps even less
than that about what the text of Enki and Ninhursag might actually say at this point
84
I can
only suggest that a similar narrative pattern might structure this episode. Supercially, of
course, the similarities are striking: (unsuccessful) rape attempt, ejaculation, thigh, wiping
of semen, autochthonous birth. In the case of Uttu, as most certainly in that of Athene,
the reference to ejaculate on the thigh may be intended as index and conrmation of her
virginityor at least, since Enki seems indeed to inseminate her (line 186), of the fact that
Uttu is an inappropriate mate, possibly because of her age.
85
This might also account for
the pain she experiences, whether during or as a result of intercourse. It is always risky to
press for more consistency than the story is able (or even willing) to provide. Questions
arise here that may be simply out of place, however critical they might seem for an inter-
pretation of the myth. Does Uttus sexual encounter with Enki alsoas does Athenes with
Hephaistosculminate in extravaginal ejaculation? Is this why there is semen on her thighs
for Ninhursag to wipe off? Or is their intercourse normal, to borrow Alsters term?
86
In
that case, is the semen on her thighs due to spillage after Enki has withdrawn his penis or
as Leick suggeststo an overow of the vast quantity of semen with which he has lled
her?
87
As we have seen, what can be called the formulaic valence of this episode strongly
suggests full insemination. Further, the experiences of her mother, her grandmother, her
great-grandmother, and so on up the generational line all lend their weight to the expectation
that Uttu is also impregnated, and this would seem to relate her pain more to problems
with conception or delivery than what is generally meant by sexual abuse. This in turn
stands in stark contrast with the preternaturally rapid pregnancy and childbirth smooth as
oil that characterized the earlier episodes.
In a sense, of course, these questions clearly push speculation beyond what the text itself
supports and (more importantly, perhaps) beyond what the story might really aim to achieve
in this passage. Myths have their own logic, and it may not be advisable to press too hard
for consistency here. The question of where the myth aims may in fact raise the more im-
portant issue. After all, one of the many distinguishing marks of mythic as opposed to literary
narratives is that myths evince relatively less concern over harmonizing (inner) motive and
(external) function. Exactly why a character in a myth does such-and-such a thing, for in-
stance, is most of the time considerably less important than the role the action itself plays
in advancing the story towards its predetermined conclusion, and myths are often all too
willing to sacrice narrative consistency in the interest of promoting the overriding function
of a character or scene. Put another way, it is literary narratives in general that tend to invest
a great deal of energy in concealing the fact that, like all narratives, they are always
heavily end-determined. In terms of the nal aim of Enki and Ninhursag, it might just be
the case that Uttulike Athene and ultimately the story, too, for that mattersomehow
gets to have it both ways here. Ninhursags intervention to wipe the semen from her great-
granddaughters thighs may well sufce as a gesture meant to signal a transition, to effect
a kind of transfer of agency via the displacement of Enkis sperm from a younger to an
84
Attinger, p. 25, n. 48 and p. 43 ad loc.
85
Compare Ninlils initial response to Enlils sexual
overture in Enlil and Ninlil (lines 3134): My vagina
is too small, it does not know pregnancy. My lips are
young, they do not know kissing. . . . (Black, Litera-
ture, p. 103).
86
Alster, p. 17.
87
Leick, p. 280, n. 20.
older female better suited to carry the sexual issue to term. This mechanism neatly allows
Uttu to be both isolated from the birth of the eight plantsas never really pregnant if
not quite sexually intact any longerand at the same time also still somehow parentally
involved with them.
(F1F2) Riverbank
Yet another recursive loop now seems to return us to the point at which Enkis sexual
adventures with his offspring rst began (C14), that is, to the liminal Riverbank. As in those
prior episodes, the place itself not only frames but also helps to identify and corroborate the
gods role as a predatory trickster by raising formulaic expectations as to his behavior. In
what might well be a parody of those earlier scenes of stalking and rape,
88
Enki is in the
Marsh again (line 196 = 90 = 110 = C4) and back on the prowl, this time spying not on his
daughters and granddaughters, but instead on the eight plants, with Isimud once more at
hand to facilitate his will. Enkis questions to his sukkal are now different, however. Rather
than asking for afrmation of his sexual desireShould I not embrace that young and
lovely woman? (lines 92 f. = 112 f. = C7 f.)his request is now (line 199) instead to
know each plants name. The theme of naming of course assumes increasingly prominent
emphasis in the course of the narrative and in a sense represents the point at which the
storyfrom at least as early as E3, if not earlier
89
means to culminate. At least super-
cially, sex now seems to have been displaced by hunger for knowledge.
While parody is in perfect keeping with Enkis role here, formulaic repetition once again
calls for closer comparison between this and the earlier scenes. Where the episodes differ
conspicuously is in the fact that eating now replaces rape of offspring. Most scholars have
regarded the consumption of the plants as both cannibalistic, on lines allegedly very similar
to the Hesiodic myth of Kronoss eating of the rst generation of the Olympian gods, and
also as gurative of Enkis incest with Ninsar and the others. The Greek myth might well
corroborate the theme of cannibalism, but incest as such is not especially at issue there,
since no sexual relations between Kronos and his children are involved.
90
There the sup-
pression of offspring instead unfolds within the specic context of intergenerational con-
ict and the broader context of antagonism between male and female over what we might
be tempted to call reproductive rights. Ingestion of the children is a tacticultimately un-
successfulresulting in a kind of uterization of Kronos, the creation of a male womb
through which Kronos temporarily gains control over the destabilizing force of female re-
productive powers, only to lose it after swallowing the abortifacient stone that is Zeus.
91
In Enkis case, however, sexual politics of this kind does not seem to be the central issue
at play. To all appearances, the motives of these two gods are quite differentor Enkis at
least somewhat more complex. If that of Kronos is to suppress the birth of offspring, Enkis
88
See Alster, p. 18.
89
Note that the tag-line in each of the earlier
formulas anticipates the theme of naming by including
the name of each of his offspring (line 93 = 113 = C8):
Should I not embrace that love NAME?
90
For the text, see Hesiod Theogony, lines 156
206, 453500 (translation in A. Athanassakis, Hesiod:
Theogony, Works and Days, Shield [Baltimore, 1983]).
For interpretation, see C. Penglase, Greek Myths and
Mesopotamia (London, 1994).
91
In the related Hittite myth of Kumarbi and
Teshshup, the motive is intergenerational conict, with
Kumarbi devouring the penis of his father Alalush.
For the text of the myth, see H. Gterbock, Hittite
Mythology, Kramer, ed., Mythologies, pp. 15565.
stated purpose, on the contrary, is to determine the destiny of the plants (lines 198,
217).
92
The fact that naming and the xing of destinies is the gods role elsewhere in far
more solemn contexts in Sumerian tradition is of course insufcient in itself to decide
whether the use of the formula in F1 is meant to be taken as parody and therefore dis-
missed.
93
Before discounting its seriousness in the context of the plants, however, it is worth
recalling two things. Firstand here we return to the issue of the end-determination of
all narrativesit should be noted that the present episode also has a genuinely sober aim,
namely, to account for the birth, identication, and installation of an octet of (albeit minor)
deities.
94
If only in this sense, the concluding episodes (E3H3) in the narrative are rigor-
ously etiological. In terms of overriding narrative function, Enki eats the plants precisely
in order that they later somehow be born as deitiesand, moreover, as deities with xed
names, familial ties, and determinate spheres of inuence. The myth therefore has authentic
cosmological import, inasmuch as it recounts the origin of a network of signicant asso-
ciations and implied inuences presumably still operative in the world, linking gods with
certain plants and both with parts of the body and the maladies specic to those parts. It
must be further noted that the voice that narrates the story also corroborates both Enkis
motive in eating the plants and also the success of his aim (line 217). Fixing their destiny
and knowing their hearts are not simply pretexts for gluttony or cannibalism; the god does
what he says and actually comes to know the plants intimately. While Enki is most certainly
playing the trickster here, too, his role should by no means be dismissed as capricious.
The second point is somewhat broader and speaks to the apparently universal connection
traditional cultures make between eating or tasting and the acquisition of knowledge.
95
If
knowing their hearts and xing their destinies is Enkis professed aim (line 217), his
method of doing so most certainly rests on a broad cross-cultural basis. For most if not all
cultures, eating is a fundamental mode of making what is alien familiar, of coming to know
it fully and thus also even assimilating its stuff and nature to ones own, in the familiar
sense of becoming what we eat. Through eating, Enki becomes awareas do we, too, for
that matter, as the beneciaries of his knowledgeof the character and specic properties
of each of these eight plants; and it is our informed ability to use them properly in medicine
and magic, after all, that is in all likelihood among the most pragmatic points of the story.
Moreover, the narrative of the tricksterdeity or culture-herowho (stupidly or otherwise)
risks health and even death in the process of determining the medicinal powers of plants
92
Lambert and Tournay, p. 129, n. 4, prefer to render
the phrase as destroy their destiny, as do Bottro and
Kramer, p. 157, who translate: Ainsi Enki connut-t-il
la nature de ces plantes/et en arrta-t-il le destin!
93
See Enki and the World Order (Black et al., eds.,
Literature, pp. 21524). Alster, p. 18, nds the reference
to Enkis determination of their destiny ironic. Bottro
and Kramer, p. 157, likewise see a contrast: Enki veut
les leur assigner en arrtant leur destin. Mais, aupa-
ravant, il entend les goter. They seem alone in sug-
gesting (ibid.) that Enki only samples the plants (et de
lui en tailler un morceau, quil gota) instead of eating
each entirely.
94
For Alster, Dilmun, Bahrain, the myths pri-
mary aim is in fact genealogical, namely, to establish
a familial, cultic link between Ur and the historical
Dilmun/Bahrain.
95
On the theme in general, see, for example,
S. Thompson, Motif-index of Folk-Literature: A Clas-
sication of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads,
Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fa-
bliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington,
Indiana, 195558), types D551 ff., D1357.1, and
D1358.1. Note also the traditional Sumerian proverb
cited by Alster (Proverbs, p. 11 [= SP 1.26]): (Only)
after you have eaten the bread you have made(?) is its
nature decided. While this may mean little more than
the proof s in the pudding, its linking of eating with
acquisition of knowledge about the nature of a thing is
nonetheless intriguing.
and herbs is also a fairly widespread one, attested in myths as far-ung as those of ancient
China and Celtic Ireland. According to the second-century b.c.e. text Huai Nan Zi, the
Chinese god Shen Nong tasted the avor of every single plant . . . and himself suffered
poisoning seventy times in one day. He later imparts his knowledge of their properties to
human beings, who beforehand had suffered much due to illness and poisoning.
96
In
Celtic tradition, much the same basic story is taken up into a far more complicated Old
Irish narrative of intergenerational rivalry.
97
Here the physician god Dian Ccht, jealous
of the medical accomplishments of his own son Miach, murders the young man. From
Miachs grave then grow 365 magical herbs with restorative qualities, corresponding to
the number of his joints and sinews. In this case, the death of the culture-hero responsible
for identifying herbs is displaced from father to son.
98
The link between medicinal plants
and specic parts of the body in the Celtic myth will bear more scrutiny when I examine the
similar link in Enki and Ninhursag.
If Enkis avowed purpose in eating the plants has a certain mythic legitimacy, then, how
does it relate to the issues of incest and punishment, which enjoy central place in most in-
terpretations of Enki and Ninhursag? It should be remembered that in one sense the status
of incest as a problem is never raised expressly in the narrative itself. However one
wishes to understand his illness as retribution, or even to associate it (as Kramer famously
does) with the violation of the prohibition on eating in the Genesis account,
99
the fact
remains that Enkis sickness is only indirectly related to his sexual adventurism in C13/
E12. If he is punished for incest, justication for that punishment is transposed from a
sexual to a culinary code. Enki incurs Ninhursags immediate anger not for rape or serial
rape or even incestuous serial rape but instead for cannibalism.
100
In one sense, of course,
it can be claimed that cannibalism is indeed analogous with incest on the ground that it is
implicitly incestuous by denition, at least insofar as both eating ones own (sc., species)
and having sex with ones own (sc., kin) constitute prohibitively close relationships with
others.
101
The cycle of fruitless, incestuous sex that characterized episodes C13 and
96
See A. Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduc-
tion (Baltimore, 1993), pp. 4750, for this and other
sources for Shen Nong.
97
The myth is preserved in the Cath Maige Tuired
(Battle of Mag Tuired), the Old Irish narrative detail-
ing the conquest of Ireland by the divine race known
as the Tuatha d Danann; for the text, see E. Gray, ed.,
Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired
([Dublin], 1982). On the theme relating the gods death
to the appearance of herbs, see also M. Detiennes
analysis (The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek
Mythology [Princeton, 1972]) of the Greek myth of
Adonis.
98
A similar kind of displacement occurs in the case
of Enki, whose suffering after eating the plants appears
overdetermined. On the one hand, it is expressly due
to Ninhursags angry withdrawal of the look of life
in F2 that he falls ill; she curses him and both literally
and guratively removes herself from his presence. Here
responsibility for his immanent death is displaced onto
Ninhursag. as in the Old Irish tale in which Dian Ccht
is the agent for Miachs death. On the other hand, both
the events leading up to her curse and also the compara-
tive evidence suggest that this is a case of poisoning,
namely, that Enki becomes sick precisely because of
what he has eaten, just as the Chinese Shen Nong does
repeatedly. These etiologies are not mutually exclusive,
of course, and both are certainly also compatible with
the third alternative, namely, that Enkis condition is a
kind of morning sickness due to pregnancy.
99
Kramer, Mythologies, pp. 102 f.
100
Rosengarten, pp. 29 f., argues that Enki is pun-
ished not for cannibalism per se but instead for having
usurped from Ninhursag/Nintu the prerogative of xing
their destiny; Bottro and Kramer, pp. 162 f., concur.
Leick, p. 40, remarks: I do not believe that incest or
rape has anything to do with her anger; it is more likely
his untoward assumption of responsibility regarding
the plants[Ninhursag] (remember that she represents
Earth) considers them as belonging to her domain.
101
On the homology between eating and sex, see
E. Leach, Anthropological Aspects of Language:
Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse, in P. Maranda,
ed., Mythology: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth,
1963), pp. 3967.
trapped Enki, his story, and possibly also the movement of time itself in a vicious loop
seems mirrored here in Enkis eating of the plants. Formulaic echoes in the stalking scene
in F1 may well verge on parody, but the underlying issue is a serious one. The transposition
from sexual to culinary codes should not conceal the fundamental identity between incest and
the devouring of young. These acts are more than simply indices of excess, however, as
Kirk argues,
102
but are instead genuinely homologous, inasmuch as cannibalism of children
and incest both amount to radical denials of progeny. Incest devours the next generation,
just as Enkis eating of the plants brings their productive life to an end before they are able
in turn to produce more offspring.
Why a transposition from a sexual to a culinary code takes place at all has much to do
with the end toward which the story aimsan end that requires Enkis eating of the plants
in order to induce a kind of male pregnancy. Here again the storys end-determination is
apparent: for Enki to give birth (somehow) to eight minor deities, he must (somehow)
become pregnant; in order to this to happen, he must eat the plants. The analogy here with
the Greek myth of Kronosalong with its older, Near Eastern templates, such as the Hittite
myth of Kumarbiis a striking one, as commentators have noted.
103
The discomfort Enki
subsequently suffers (H1) is thus best understood in two senses. On the one hand, it is a
sequence of individual pains in specically localized bodily sites (lines 25168)head,
hair, nose, mouth, throat, arm, ribs, sidesfor which plants (and corresponding gods) will
be produced to effect remedies. At the same time, the suffering also collectively amounts to
a kind of labor-pain, presumably just as in the case of Uttu in E2. The pain they both ex-
perienceby contrast with the formulaically smooth birth of the previous generations
of femalesdraws attention to the markedly inappropriate or abnormal nature of their
conditions. In Uttus case, the fragmentary nature of the text makes this issue a speculative
one. Her pain, as I suggested, may well serve as index of the fact that she is simply too
young for intercourse and/or childbirth. In Enkis case, the unnaturalness of male preg-
nancy is reason enough for his sickness. That Ninhursags later intervention (H12)
results somehow in the (re)birth from Enki of the eight plants he earlier swallowed, now
in a different form, further strengthens the argument for the uterization of the male god,
just as occurs in the Greek and (for very different reasons) the Hittite myths.
However true that might be, the narratives real emphasis seems to lie elsewhere, less with
the issue of incest as suchon which most commentators focus
104
than with the trans-
formation of the plants into gods, linked to one another and to specic parts of the body
etymologically and therefore, one assumes, also in terms of their essential characters and
powers. The passage (F1) in which Enki determines their destiny by ingesting them thus
makes sense best as the rst stage in a process that culminates in their second birth and
apotheosis in H12. In both cases, everything centers on the act of naming. This is pre-
sumably because, for Sumerian as for all traditional communities, knowing the heart
and xing the destiny are correlative acts in which the nature of a thing is rst discovered,
then expressed, and thereby permanently established in the form of the name that embodies
102
Kirk, p. 96.
103
Ibid., pp. 95 f.; Penglase, Greek Myths, pp.
185 ff.
104
Evers, Myth and Narrative, p. 40, while appar-
ently acknowledging the incest, dismisses what he con-
siders the overly moral judgment of Kirk and other
commentators. See also Leick, quoted above (n. 100).
its essence. In Enki and Ninhursag, this initially takes place in Isimuds naming of the plants
as Enki eats each one on the Riverbank, and by which he swallows, incorporates, and
therefore comes to know them and determine their destinies. The second stage, far more
mysterious, takes the form of his (somehow) giving birth to them as deities who, the story
seems to claim, both embody and guarantee what properties the plants themselves have
within a magico-medical pharmacopoeia.
105
Just as in the transformation of Dilmun in A14,
the narrative here, too, celebrates a kind of alchemythough this time pursuant not to
irrigation/fertilization but instead to acts of birth, ingestion, and rebirth. This nal meta-
morphosis, however, requires a change of venue from Riverbank to Temple and then from
Temple to what the myth considers the source of all life.
(G1G3) Temple
Cursed by Ninhursag, and apparently sick unto death from his meal, Enki the trickster sits
or lies immobile, as do the other gods, too, the Annunaki, who all sit in the dust (line 220).
The goddess herself has withdrawn somewhere, with consequences presumably more wide-
spread than the immediate effect her curse has on Enki alone. The threat is in fact cosmo-
logicalno less than the undoing of everything that has been accomplished so far.
106
With
Enkis death comes the recession of the transformative sweet waters that rst gave life to
the City (A34), fertilized the Marsh (B12), and later produced the Garden (D1) of fruits
and vegetables. Entire webs of interrelationships and associationseconomic production,
trade, institutions founded on the exchange of goods, along with all else that results from
these activitieswould cease to exist or would again fall into the kind of primal latency
with which the narrative at rst opened. With his death, the known world lapses into the
merely virtual, dormant state of Dilmun prior to its initial irrigation by Enki (A1)a dream-
like litany of vivid negations. The narrative is therefore again at a critical impasse, in a
way quite similar to the one represented by the vicious cycle of rape scenes in C13, and
there is once more need for some kind of intervention. The movement this time, too, comes
in double form, through a shift in placefrom Riverbank to Templeand also in agent of
actionfrom Enki to the new character of the fox. This latter shift, moreover, in turn brings
yet another one, at the level of narrative genrefrom sacred myth to folktale.
The new space that opens is that of the Temple, presumably Enlils at Nippur.
107
This is
a place of resolution. It serves at one and the same time as the locus of the authority in-
vested in the higher gods, the site for nal adjudication of conicts between them, and also
the point of (physical and ritual) contact between the divine and human worlds. Despite
the absence of human beings in the narrative, except by implication in A2 and A4, it is of
course, after all, the human world that stands to be most radically affected by the events in the
story. The tale of the tricksters imminent death bodes the death of all culture. The demise
105
See C. Gadds review of Kramer (Journal of the
American Oriental Society 66 [1956]: 26667). Kramer
(for example, Kramer and Maier, Myths, p. 29) consis-
tently refers to the octet as healing deities; see also
Bottro and Kramer, pp. 162 f.
106
Leick, p. 40, still acknowledges the serious-
ness of this episode, despite her emphasis on absurd
comedy as the key to the interpretation of the story,
noting (p. 39) We do not get the impression of great
religious intensity. A work such as Enki and Ninhur-
saga therefore makes no sense as myth or a deeply
signicant theological treatise.
107
Lambert and Tournay, p. 130, n. 4.
of this world in turn spells disaster for the gods world, too, since both are intimately inter-
twined. Built at the intersection of both worlds, the Temple offers the only venue in which
mediation can occur between themboth now threatened by the loss of the very uid of
lifeand an absent deity.
The long passage (lines 22944) describing the foxs successful attempt to bring Nin-
hursag back to the Temple is unfortunately far too broken to support any idea of exactly how
the feat is performed. That Fox now emerges as the agent of resolution, however, thereby re-
placing Enki as the principal mover of the action, is worth notice. In one sense, given both
the traditional association of foxes with cunning and of tricksters with cunning animals,
108
Foxs appearance in the narrative at this point might best be understood in terms of a kind
of doubling. That is, at the level of function, the animal is more than likely a gure for Enki
himself, representing the tricksters cleverness by contrast with the reckless stupidity that
has brought him into the present situation. The moral and intellectual division I noted before
within the tricksters own character, resulting in his ambiguity and ambivalence as a gure,
can just as easily take the form of a splitting of the trickster into two separate individuals,
as with Prometheus and Epimetheus in the Greek tradition, for example. Moreover, while
material evidence exists suggesting a cultic association between foxes and Enlil,
109
not
Enki, at least one element in the present narrative in fact strongly suggests a link with Enki
instead, namely, the use of similar or perhaps identical tactics. For with clear tones of parody
(lines 22628), Fox apparently also goes a-courtin in his attempt to win Ninhursag back,
smoothing or oiling his fur and applying make-up to his eyes. The implication here is that
he deploys a ruse much like the one used by Enki (line 168) to gain entrance to the House of
Uttu (E1). It would be interesting to know whether this case, too, involved impersonation.
The introduction of a folktale element in the character of Fox likewise mirrors a similar,
earlier shift in the narrative from A4 and B1, where the crude burlesque of Enkis romp in
the Marsh replaced his more august role as creatoror at least primal animatorof
Dilmun. The nearly complete loss of the present passage makes even speculation difcult.
What is clear is that in the broadest terms, the discernible narrative motifs are apparently
all familiar ones and serve to conrm the folkloric signature of this episode:
110
(1) Fox offers
help on condition of recompense (lines 221 f.). (2) The great god Enlil, unable himself to
remedy the problem despite his status as highest power and authority, agrees to bestow on the
lowly animal a reward that is both materialthe tree kishkanu, whatever its signicance
may be
111
and also social, in the form of a promise to celebrate Foxs name (lines 22325).
(3) Fox then passes throughor at least subsequently narratesa series of unsuccessful
attempts (lines 23336), visits to one god after another, before somehow nally managing
to return Ninhursag to the Temple, where the Annunaki take her and strip her of clothes in
preparation for the cure.
108
On the fox in Sumerian literature, see B. Alster,
On the Earliest Sumerian Literary Tradition, Journal
of Cuneiform Studies 28 (1976): 125, n. 52, and es-
pecially Proverbs, pp. 5660 (= SP 1.5870).
109
Lambert and Tournay, p. 130, n. 5. Rosengarten,
pp. 30 f., refers to the animal as messager dEn-lil.
110
On the motif, see M. Cohen, ed. and trans.,
The Canonical Lamentations of Ancient Mesopotamia
(Potomac, Maryland, 1988), pp. 1925.
111
Attinger, p. 44 ad loc., notes the association of
the kishkanu with Enki and Eridu and remarks that
it joue un rle important dans les rituals. This link
would in itself seem to strengthen the claim made
earlier linking Enki with Fox. Note also that Enlil
promises to plant such a tree in his own city of Nippur.
(H1H3) Vulva
Ninhursags nakedness marks the culmination of a dominant theme. The narrative has
unfolded thus far within a succession of signicant spaces that have served as far more
than just static backdrops for the action. Each space instead tends to embody a specic char-
acter of its own and therefore also to dene certain predictable narrative possibilities. This
was especially clear, as we saw, in the case of Marsh and Riverbank, both spaces marked as
potentially dangerous, sexually charged, the sites of abduction and rape and, in general, the
often violent confrontation between raw nature and the cultured world. Stalkers lurk in the
Marsh and lie there in wait to violate young females who venture too close to the Bank that
divides the Marsh from the dry and habitable land of their mothers. The Garden, too, is a
place marked by the meeting of nature and culture, but in this case their conjunction is trans-
formative: raw natural processes (Enkis sweet waters) are cultivated to produce vegetables
and fruits that then become the stuff of social (and especially sexual) exchange. Cucumbers,
apples (or apricots?), and grapes have value both as food and also, more importantly, as
tokens in a system in which they signify the beloveds desirability and her lovers own
sublimated desire.
112
In turn, the House is a cultural artifact both in its physical structure
and especially as an ediface of social rituals, a space in which is enacted a xed choreography
of question and answer, adit and egress across a threshold, thereby ideally bringing about the
metamorphosis of stranger into suitor and suitor into acceptable mate. Unlike the River-
bank, where all sex is predation, the House is the site of the domestication of sexual desire
into socially sanctioned marriage. With its buildings, broad avenues, and busy quays, and
with its network of links to other cities throughout the known world, the City is the very
paradigm of cultural space. Its counterpart is the Temple, positioned at the center of each
City and thereby connected horizontally, as it were, to all communities and templesand
also the site of the vertical link between human and divine. In each one of these spaces, the
trickster Enki makes and leaves his mark, whether for good or evil, to transform creatively
(City, Marsh, Garden) or else through violation (Riverbank, House). In the latter case,
moreover, the violated conventions are thereby implicitly conrmed, in keeping with the
tricksters function of establishing limits by transgressing them.
The nal space through which the story passes lies within the body itself; it is the central
space, in fact, at least in terms of the production of life, namely, the matrix that is the Vulva
of Ninhursag, stripped naked by the Annunaki in the Temple of Enlil. That this last site is a
bodily one should come as no real surprise. To a certain degree, the narrative has reected
all along what can be called an implicit anthropomorphization of space. This is especially the
case within the framework of a sexual code in which, as we saw, irrigation and intercourse
are interchangeable terms. Enkis watering of Dilmun (A3) is, after all, only a somewhat
less explicit instance of his overtly sexual acts in the Marsh (B1) and elsewhere. The fact
is that corresponding to each of these objective, external spaces in the narrative has been
the female bodily spacevagina and wombthat receives Enkis male uids, whether on
each occasion the act of reception is expressly or only metaphorically sexual. The cisterns
of Dilmun, the furrows of the Marsh, the Garden as locus amoenus, the doorway of the
112
On the allegedly aphrodisiac qualities of fruit,
see Leick, p. 34, with references, and n. 69 above.
One Line Short
House, as borders encountered and crossed in intercourse, have all been implicitly gendered
and sexualized. Enkis movements throughout the narrative, whether as sweet rising waters
or violent sexual predation, have in each and every case traversed and marked the space of
the female body, transforming it into City and Marshland, Mother and Garden.
In addition to being the site of action, the body has also been an affective site measured
in terms of pleasure and suffering. The repeated formula (B2, C1, C2, C3) describing birth
as smooth as oil nds its counterpart rst in Uttus lament (E2) over places on her body
that cause her painAh! my thighs! Ah! my belly/womb!after her experience with Enki.
These places in turn pregure the pain that Enki himself now suffers (H1) in eight bodily
sites; each scene echoes the other, if only by contrast with the smooth births, and they
do so, I suggested, as indices of abnormal or marked states. What links both passages even
more strongly together is the fact that in each case pain issues in an act of naming. Just as
Uttu cries out to identify the places where her body hurts, so too does Enki (H1) localize his
pain by specically naming his head, hair, nose, mouth, throat, arm, ribs, and sides. Names
have, of course, been an integral part of the narrative all along, at the very least insofar as one
of its aims has been to account for the existence of the deities Ninsar, Ninkurra, Ninimma,
and Uttu, whose births and names it recounts. More signicantly, it is difcult not to see
a foreshadowing of the penultimate scene (H1), in which Enki names his pain in answer to
Ninhursags questions, in the earlier scene (F1) in which Isimud responds to Enkis ques-
tions by naming each plant for the trickster to eat and x in terms of its destiny. The act
of naming in fact marks the goal and culmination of the narrative. In terms of that goal,
the eight plants, eight parts, eight pains, eight names, eight deities are most certainly meant
to correspond directly with one another, thereby underwriting the storys implicit claim
a major tenet of all myths, if least acceptable to modern sensibilities
113
that etiology is in
some fundamental sense identical with etymology.
In this sense, it is perhaps only tting that interpretation of the setting of this nal episode
should hinge on a preposition. After Ninhursag has been stripped by the Annunaki, the
moribund Enki is placed (line 250) before or by or else within her vulva. Commen-
tators part company here in terms of which preposition is correct and also how to interpret
its meaning; all tend to agree that the passage is implicitly something of a locus desperatus.
Despite acknowledging that the phrase actually . . . seems to say in her vulva, Kramer
opts for by (?) her vulva (6) in his translation of the text;
114
in his study of Enki pub-
lished more than four decades later, this has become in her vulva, though the translation
sur son giron in Bottro and Kramer returns us outside the body.
115
Some twenty-ve years
after Kramers rst edition, Rosengarten no doubt unintentionally makes the scene resemble
the Piet in having Ninhursag prend sur ses genoux le dieu malade,
116
but in any case once
again appears to move the text (and Enki, too) farther from the goddess. Kirk, on the other
hand, squarely places Enki inside Ninhursags body,
117
as does Alster, who translates the
113
See, for example, E. Cassirer, Language and
Myth (New York, 1953), pp. 4462.
114
Kramer, p. 30; Gadds review (see n. 105
above) of that edition in the following year seconds
that rendition by having Ninhursag lay Enki beside
her (p. 266).
115
Compare Bottro and Kramer, p. 158, sur
son giron, with their translation en son giron in the
formulaic references to sexual penetration (at lines 75,
101, 122, and 185).
116
Rosengarten, p. 31.
117
Kirk, pp. 92, 97.
phrase rst as in her womb and later in her vulva;
118
Evers, following Kirk, concurs.
119
Attinger, nally, seems at rst to return to Kramers initial position by rendering the
preposition as devant, but also has explicit reservations. In his commentary (line 45 ad
loc.) he admits that dans may well be correct after all, glossing that choice as an ex-
pression raccourcie pour: (. . .) t asseoir Enki (et t pntrer le pnis) dans sa vulve.
120
Textual and social misgivings aside, there would seem to be no good reason not to take
the text at face value, so to speak, and place Enkis entire body directly inside the female
body of Ninhursag. Attingers apparent hesitation to do so completely, his understanding of
the preposition as a kind of shorthand for normal sexual intercourse(et t pntrer le
pnis)is possibly a response to the literal crudeness of the scene. There is no denying
that myths can be uninchingly direct, however, and if precedent is needed for one gravid
deity within the body of another, one need look no farther than the Hesiodic myth of Zeuss
incorporation of his Titan aunt Metis.
121
The myth itself, of course, prefers to discount the
fact that it is Metis who gives birth after Zeus swallows her, since its primary motive is in-
stead to represent Athenes birth as an instance of triumphant male parthenogenesis rather
than just some kind of sleight of hand. At any rate, here, too, we have an instance of birth
from the body of one character being as it were redirected and rechanneled through the body
of another (of opposite gender) before the offspring actually enters the world. That in both
cases the rechanneling also involves a switch in the gender of the enclosing bodyfemale
(Metis) to male (Zeus) in Greek, male (Enki) to female (Ninhursag) in Sumerianmakes
for an interesting symmetry between these two stories.
Zeuss ingestion of Metis, like Kronoss of his children, is a deliberate tactic that aimsin
this case, more successfullyat subordinating female to male power. This does not seem to
be matched (in reversed form) in the Enki and Ninhursag narrative. A kind of subordinated
birthing is certainly also at play here, but there is not as much overt emphasis either on the
issue of male/female antagonism, as in the Greek tale, or on intergenerational rivalry, which
fuels the conict in the Hittite myth of Kumarbi and Teshshup. Instead, Enkis entry into
Ninhursag appears to result in their collaborative effort in giving birth to the eight deities.
Just as with the origin of the plants in E3, the specic manner in which the octet of gods
is actually born in H2 (line 253) remains somewhat unclear.
122
Attinger (line 46 ad loc.) notes
that they either come into existence passivelyX is bornor else, as he prefers in his
translation, through a process by which Ninhursag somehow causes them to be born from
within [Enki from within] herself without herself really giving birth to themthis expressed
through a syntax that permettrait dinsister sur le caractre non-naturel de la naissance.
Attingers motivation in stressing the abnormal method of their birth is to insulate Nin-
hursag from a charge of incest stemming from the fact that the last child born in the
present sequenceEnsaag, Lord of Dilmunis elsewhere in the tradition identied as
Ninhursags spouse.
123
Despite the location of the scene within the space of her Vulva,
118
Without further explanation, Alster, p. 59, re-
marks that the placement of Enki is probably a hint at
the ritualistic birth of a king.
119
Evers, Myth and Narrative, p. 37.
120
Attinger, p. 31 with n. 54.
121
Hesiod Theogony, lines 886926 (= Atha-
nassakis, Hesiod, pp. 35 f.).
122
Attinger, p. 24, n. 49 and p. 43 ad loc. Bottro
and Kramer, pp. 158 f., are more certain, translating
the formulaic line as je [sc., Ninhursag] cre pour toi
[Enki] la desse. . . .
123
Attinger, p. 46 ad loc., translates: Elle (Nin-
hursaga) t natre (X) de l (de sa vulve). . . . Nin-
hursaga nest pas proprement parler la mre (au sens
Ninhursag is thus, in some sense, less engaged with the actual birth of the eight gods than
if she were their mother au sense biologique du terme. What this reservation apparently
afrms is Enkis own closer involvement as genuine birth parent. If the mode of birthing
exhibits a caractre non-naturel, it is precisely because the offspring that seem to issue
from Ninhursag in fact instead really issue from the pregnant male god Enki lodged inside
the vulva of the female goddess. Painfully gravid with the eight plants he has eaten, Enki
brings them to term from within the matrix of life itself, with Ninhursags role in this un-
natural procedure a curious blend of mother and midwife.
Her maieusis is weird and unworldly. Teshshups debate with himself in the Hittite myth
over how exactly to exit the male body of the pregnant Kumarbiby the anus, by the penis,
by the mouth?possibly captures some of the unnatural quality Attinger has in mind with
respect to the birth of these deities.
124
Is the issue here one of Enkis needing to borrow a
vulva, so to speak, in order to have an orice through which these new offspring can come
into the world? Is that why he actually needs to be implanted, pregnant, withinnot next
to or before or on the knees of Ninhursag for the blessed event(s) to occur?
125
The
myth culminates in Enkis passage into a space into which he has (partly) entered many
times before but never inhabited as fully since before his own birth. What is wrought there
in mythic terms, just as in the case of Metis, is an act of genuine incorporation, thanks to
which a kind of merger takes place, and the power of birth specic to one is (temporarily)
transferred to the other. However we picture it, the abnormality of the procedure corroborates
the miraculous character of the transformation it effects: from plants grown (somehow) on
the Riverbank out of Enkis sperm to offspring whose hearts are known and whose destinies
are xed by an act of cannibalistic ingestion, and nally to gods somehow brought into
being from out of a body simultaneously female and male. From the folktale story of the
stupid or greedy trickster sick to death from his meal and rescued by the intervention of
the plucky fox, we return to something again resembling sacred myth. As in A3 and D1,
Enki is once more a creator, a father/mother of divinities, this time in some strange con-
junction with Ninhursag.
The procedure is much involved with acts of naming. A narrative already marked by the
rhetorical trope of enumerationwhether of everything Dilmun as yet is not (A1) or of all
it has (or will) become after Enkis touch (A4); of Uttus pains, either in intercourse or
labor (E2); or else of the plants Isimud names for Enki as the god devours them one by
one (F1)now culminates in two nal litanies. The rst (H1) is the list of emergent gods,
each expressly associated with a part of the body in which Enki feels pain and brought into
existence by collaborative, punning interplay between Enki and Ninhursag.
126
The verbal
correspondences, based on what strike the modern reader as at best folk etymologies,
provide the glue for the network of associations linking gods and body parts to plants and
biologique du terme) des diverses divinits et peut, sans
danger dinceste, pouser Ensaag.
124
See Gterbock, Hittite Mythology, pp. 157 f.
125
Compare Leick, pp. 38 f., who (taking Jacobsens
lead) emphasizes the absurd humor of the story as a
whole: . . . what could be more risible than a man
made pregnant by his own sperm? To say nothing of
the humiliation of being at the mercy of the Wife and
having to borrow her sexual equipment to rid himself
of his painful progeny.
126
See M. Civil, From Enkis Headaches to Pho-
nology, JNES 32 (1973): 56761; Attinger, pp. 45
47 ad loc. and chart p. 48. The dialogue between
Ninhursag and the embedded Enki suggestively calls
to mind Hesiods claim (Theogony, lines 899900) that
after being swallowed by Zeus, Metis remains within
him to provide [lit., speak to] him with advice.
ailments. Scholars are unanimous in nding the proposed resemblances rather less than
convincing, to say the very least.
127
This is, of course, unsurprising in an audience for
whom the connection between words and things is considered for the most part (excepting
onomatopoeia) a purely articial one.
128
It is safe to assume that the author(s) of Enki and
Ninhursag and its intended audience(s) do not share this view of language, however, or at
least are more tolerant of the kinds of associations the text promotes.
Alster reads the intent behind this wordplay as light-hearted, remarking that the selection
[of gods and body-parts] is inuenced by the wish to provide laughter-provoking puns;
129
Jacobsen, in turn, identies it as a brilliant jeu desprit.
130
While amusement is certainly
part of the issueas in all trickster taleswe should not lose sight of a somewhat more
serious intent, on the assumption that the correspondences established in the narrative are
meant to have some practical value in the course of magico-medical therapy.
131
From a
position outside their specic cultural context (or subcontext) such systematizations always
seem arbitrary at best, as do many of the elements of ancient Greek humoral theory and the
so-called doctrine of signatures that dominated much of European Renaissance thinking.
132
Within such contexts, however, the strained links spell out the terms of a system held in
place by the interrelated essences and destinies of things, bestowed by the gods or by
nature and thereafter indwelling them as part of their henceforth inalterable constitutions.
Knowledge of a things essence, often bound up closely with its name, allows for its
manipulation in the interest either of healing or harming. The Celtic myth recounted
earlier offers a similar model, in which the herbs that spring up on the slain Miachs grave
correspond to the number of his joints and sinews. Presumably there, too, as in most
traditional pharmacopoeia, a roughly iconic resemblance holds between the plant or herb
and the ailment or part it reputedly has the power to cure, and its power, of course, derives
precisely from that presumed resemblance.
133
The narratives nal litany is the one in which the destinies of these newborn and newly
named gods are xed, just as were those of the named plants Enki rst ate in F1; the two
scenes are surely analogous at the very least, if not, in some mythic sense, identical. The
pronouncement is either that of Enki alone or Ninhursagor of both conjointlygranting
each divine offspring a sphere of inuence or a spouse.
134
What results from their birth at
127
Lambert and Tournay, p. 132, speak of ty-
mologies bizarres. Kramer, Mythology, p. 59, perhaps
summarizes the position best with these comments:
. . . the superciality and barren articiality of the
concepts implied in this closing passage of our myth . . .
are brought out quite clearly by the Sumerian original.
For the fact is that the actual relationship between each
of the healing deities and the sickness which it is
supposed to cure, is verbal and nominal only; this re-
lationship manifests itself in the fact that the name of
the deity contains in it part or all of the word signifying
the corresponding aching part of Enkis body. In brief,
it is only because the name of the deity sounded like
the sick body-member that the makers of this myth
were induced to associate the two; actually there is no
organic relationship between them.
See also Bottro and Kramer, p. 163.
128
See Cassirer, Language, pp. 4462.
129
Alster, p. 19.
130
Jacobsen, p. 185.
131
This is clearly the assumption of Bottro and
Kramer, p. 163, who remark: Cest en crant pour
chacune delles [the eight plants] une divinit mi-
neure . . . que Ninhursag en fait autant des spciques
des divers malaises qui ont attaqu son poux . . .et
qui . . . sen pourront prendre tous les hommes.
132
On the doctrine of signatures, see, for ex-
ample, M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York,
1973).
133
See J. Scarborough, ed., Folklore and Folk
Medicines (Madison, 1987), for extensive references.
134
On the ambiguity over agency, see Attinger,
p. 31, n. 56; on the specic correspondences, see
Attingers chart, p. 48.
the closure of the myth are aspects of a stable world held together by correspondences
expressly xed in the language that names them and anchored in Enkis own body.
135
Im-
planted in the body of the female, his male body is the ultimate guarantor of that worlds
stability, at least insofar as his body lends the names of its own spaceshead, hair, nose,
mouth, throat, arm, ribs, and sidesto the names these new gods bear: this one is Nin-ka-si,
for instance (lines 259 f., 273), She Who Fills the Mouth (ka) with beer (kash) and thereby
satises desire (ng-sh si), precisely because she was born from Enkis own mouth (ka).
His trickster body thus both gives rise (somehow) to their existence and also underwrites
their respective essences and functions.
The acts and tribulations of Enkis body traversing, modifying, and being modied in
turn by female bodily space have in a sense been the subject of the myth all along. The
stable world that emerges at closure is presided over by a chief god, Ensaag, spouse of Nin-
hursag, the Lord of a Dilmun that at the beginning of the story was at best merely virtual,
no paradise but instead a merely rhetorical space that nexiste vraiment;
136
by the end,
that space now encompasses vast networks of economic, sexual, social, cultic, technological,
and magico-medical commerce, all dened by Enkis transgressions. The entire series of
transformations of its aboriginally pure, bright, and arid space wrought by Enki in the
course of his passage through City, Marsh, Riverbank, Garden, House, and Templetrans-
formations reected in the weird alchemy of semen into plants into deitiesculminates in
Enkis own transformation within the space of the Vulva into a suffering male trickster
who has power to know, to name, and to give birth. If Ensaag is Lord, Enki is (somehow)
Father of Dilmun. The nascent world comes fully into being and is maintained through
Tricksters exuberant sexual and culinary hunger, through his violence, his deception, his
knowledge, his bellyache, his ridiculous and magical pregnancy, his status as simultaneously
sacred and cursed.
137
The eight gods born into Dilmun are presumably followed by Enkis
own reemergence from inside the female space of Ninhursag. This reemergence is itself
transformative; it coincides, as the myth itself implies in its nal, hymnic formula of praise
(line 278), with Enkis healing and the continuance of a world whose life still depends on
his volatile, uid health.
135
The extent to which the present myth can be
understood in terms of the typology of cosmogonic
narratives set forth by B. Lincoln, in Myth, Cosmos, and
Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and De-
struction (Cambridge, Mass., 1986) is the subject of an
independent study; see my forthcoming article, Enki
and the Embodied World, Journal of the American
Oriental Society (2007).
136
137
See especially L. Hyde, Trickster Makes This
World (New York, 1998).

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