of heaven is postulated as the necessary precedent of Enki’s activities, the latter creates the Deep, vegetation, mountains, seas, and mankind.  Moreover, in his character as God of Wisdom, he is not only the teacher but the creator of those deities who were patrons of man’s own constructive work.  From such evidence we may infer that in his temple at Eridu, now covered by the mounds of Abu Shahrain in the extreme south of Babylonia, and regarded in early Sumerian tradition as the first city in the world, Enki himself was once celebrated as the sole creator of the universe.

The combination of the three gods Anu, Enlil, and Enki, is persistent in the tradition; for not only were they the great gods of the universe, representing respectively heaven, earth, and the watery abyss, but they later shared the heavenly sphere between them.  It is in their astrological character that we find them again in creative activity, though without the co-operation of any goddess, when they appear as creators of the great light-gods and as founders of time divisions, the day and the month.  This Sumerian myth, though it reaches us only in an extract or summary in a Neo-Babylonian schoolboy’s exercise,(1) may well date from a comparatively early period, but probably from a time when the “Ways” of Anu, Enlil, and Enki had already been fixed in heaven and their later astrological characters had crystallized.

(1) See The Seven Tablets of Creation, Vol.  I, pp. 124 ff.  The tablet gives extracts from two very similar Sumerian and Semitic texts.  In both of them Anu, Enlil, and Enki appear as creators “through their sure counsel”.  In the Sumerian extract they create the Moon and ordain its monthly course, while in the Semitic text, after establishing heaven and earth, they create in addition to the New Moon the bright Day, so that “men beheld the Sun-god in the Gate of his going forth”.

The idea that a goddess should take part with a god in man’s creation is already a familiar feature of Babylonian mythology.  Thus the goddess Aruru, in co-operation with Marduk, might be credited with the creation of the human race,(1) as she might also be pictured creating on her own initiative an individual hero such as Enkidu of the Gilgamesh Epic.  The role of mother of mankind was also shared, as we have seen, by the Semitic Ishtar.  And though the old Sumerian goddess, Ninkharsagga, the “Lady of the Mountains”, appears in our Sumerian text for the first time in the character of creatress, some of the titles we know she enjoyed, under her synonyms in the great God List of Babylonia, already reflected her cosmic activities.(2) For she was known as

     “The Builder of that which has Breath”,
     “The Carpenter of Mankind”,
     “The Carpenter of the Heart”,
     “The Coppersmith of the Gods”,
     “The Coppersmith of the Land”, and
     “The Lady Potter”.

     (1) Op. cit., p. 134 f.