Giants, Gods and Beings
Sumer and Babylon: Beings
Giants, Gods and Beings pages that draw on Sumer and Babylon, each with the sources shown. Start with Anu (An), Anunnaki, Apkallu (the seven sages), Enki (Ea).
Gods · Sumer and BabylonAnu (An)The star-shaped cuneiform sign that spelled the sky god's name was written before every god's name, so his symbol became the mark of divinity itself. Yet Anu mostly stays in his distant heaven while younger gods act; Etana and Adapa both tried to reach that heaven. Why would the father of the gods stay so remote?Beings · Sumer and BabylonAnunnakiIn one Sumerian poem, the gods who rule the cosmos sit as seven underworld judges who can turn a goddess into a corpse with a single look. The name probably means "offspring of An," yet modern writers made it famous as a name for astronauts. What do the real texts say about these gods?Beings · Sumer and BabylonApkallu (the seven sages)Seven semi-divine sages, sent by Enki before the Flood to teach humans civilization, were carved as fish-men and eagle-headed spirits. The seventh, Utuabzu, is said to have ascended to heaven, much like Enoch, the seventh patriarch in Genesis; scholars debate whether that is literary borrowing. Who were these sages, really?Gods · Sumer and BabylonEnki (Ea)Enki saves humanity from the Flood without technically breaking his oath: bound to secrecy, he tells the plan to a wall while the hero listens on the other side. The Sumerian god of fresh water also designs the first humans, and in another story gives away civilization while drunk. Who walked off with it?Gods · Sumer and BabylonEnlilThe king of the gods grew so annoyed by the noise of multiplying humans that he sent plague, then drought, then the Flood. Yet in one Sumerian myth the other gods arrest Enlil himself and expel him from his own city for ritual impurity. Why did the most powerful god in Sumer end up exiled?Beings · Sumer and BabylonHumbabaBabylonian fortune-tellers made clay masks of Humbaba whose faces were formed from a single coiled intestine. In the epics he guards the Cedar Forest: his roar is the flood, his mouth is fire, his breath is death; Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed him against the will of the gods. Why strike down a god's own guard?Beings · Sumer and BabylonIgigiThe oldest strike in literature was a strike by gods; after thousands of years digging rivers and heaping up mountains, the junior gods of Babylon burned their tools and surrounded their boss's house at night. The epic Atrahasis says humankind was created to take over the work. How does a god settle a labor dispute?Gods · Sumer and BabylonInannaTo revive Inanna in the underworld, Enki makes two small beings from the dirt under his fingernails. She is also the goddess who, the story says, stole more than a hundred divine powers, the me behind kingship, priesthood and music, and sailed them home to Uruk in the Boat of Heaven. How did she get away with it?Gods · Sumer and BabylonMardukWhen enemies captured Marduk's statue and carried it abroad, Babylonian writers explained the loss as the god choosing to go on a journey. He began as the minor god of a minor city; in the epic Enuma Elish he splits the sea-monster Tiamat in two and earns fifty names. How does a small-town god become king?Gods · Sumer and BabylonNinurtaAfter defeating an army of living stones, the warrior god Ninurta holds a trial of rocks, pronouncing a different fate on each kind of stone for how it behaved in the war. His weapon can talk, too; scholars read the myth as floods, mountains and irrigation dressed up as battle. What does a verdict on stones sound like?Beings · Sumer and BabylonOannesAccording to the priest Berossus, a creature with a fish's body and a second, human head under the fish's head rose from the sea in the first year of the world. It taught writing and law by day, ate nothing among people, and slept in the sea each night; Berossus survives only secondhand. What else was quoted?Beings · Sumer and BabylonTiamatIn the Babylonian creation epic, the Tigris and Euphrates flow out of the eyes of a dead goddess; Tiamat is the primeval salt sea and mother of the first gods. She prepares for war, gives birth to eleven kinds of monsters, and then her split body becomes the sky and the earth. Who won?
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