Atrahasis: The Making of Humankind

Forty years, the poem says, and the numbers on that line are damaged, so read it as the translator’s best guess at a very long time. Forty years the lesser gods had stood in the mud with baskets and spades and dug. They cut the beds of the Tigris and the Euphrates by hand, opened the canals and the wells that the poem calls the life of the land, and heaped up all the mountains. They did it night and day, because the senior gods had loaded the whole weight of the work onto them and gone to rest. This is where the oldest full account of why humankind exists opens: not with a word spoken over the dark, but with a workforce standing in a ditch, worn past bearing, beginning to mutter.

Muttering down in the ditch

The complaint starts small and low, denouncing and grumbling in the excavation itself. These diggers are the IgigiThe lesser gods who dig the rivers and canals and bear the drudgery in Atra-hasis; their strike against the senior gods is what forces the making of humankind., the junior gods, and they have had enough. Then the grumbling finds a shape. Let us face up to the foreman, they say; he must lift this heavy burden off us. And the burden has a name at the top of it. Enlil, counsellor of the gods and their warrior, is the one for whom all the digging is done, and it is against Enlil that the muttering turns. Come, the rebels say, let us remove him from his dwelling.

What follows is a call to arms. Now then, call for battle; battle let us join, warfare. The gods set fire to their tools, their spades, and their workbaskets, so that the means of the hated labour went up together in the dark, and then they marched, one and all, to the gate of the warrior Enlil’s house.

The house surrounded in the dark

It was night, halfway through the watch, when the ring closed. The house was surrounded, and the god inside did not know it. EkurThe house and temple of Enlil, the supreme god, surrounded by the rebel gods in the night while Enlil sleeps unaware inside. was surrounded, and Enlil did not know. There is the whole horror of the scene in one repeated line: the supreme god asleep in his own temple while an army of his own workers stands silent around the walls, and no messenger has reached him. The god at the centre of the rebellion is the last to hear of it.

When he does wake, Enlil does not go out. He sends his vizier NuskuEnlil's vizier and messenger, sent out armed to the assembled rebels to demand who began the war., who takes up his weapons and goes down alone to the mob at the gate, carrying a demand framed in the names of the four highest authorities of heaven, Anu the sky-father, Enlil the warrior, Ninurta the prefect, and Ennugi the bailiff: Who is the instigator of this battle? Who declared war, that fighting has run right up to the gate of Enlil?

Nobody will be named

The answer he gets back is the pivot of the whole story, and it is why this is not a tale of a rebellion put down. The gods do not surrender a ringleader. Every one of us, they say, has declared war. The drudgery has been killing us; the labour was too much; and every one of us has resolved on this reckoning with Enlil. There is no single culprit to drag out and make an example of. The strike is unanimous. And that changes the problem the assembly must solve. You cannot punish a crime everyone committed at once; you can only remove its cause, and the cause is the work.

It is Ea, the god of wisdom, who says so out loud. What charge do we lay against them, he asks; their forced labour was heavy, their misery too much. He does not call for justice. He calls for a replacement. The midwife-goddess is here among us, he points out; let her make a creature to bear the yoke, and let man take up the drudgery of the god. The assembly turns to her at once. Will you be the birth-goddess, the maker of mankind? Make a being that can carry the load, the task of Enlil.

A god killed to season the clay

The goddess has more than one name in the same poem, Nintu and Mami and Belet-ili, all of them the one midwife. She agrees, but she will not claim the work alone. It is not mine to do, she says; the task is Enki’s. He is the one who purifies; let him give me the clay, and I will do the shaping. The making needs a raw material she cannot supply, and the god of the sweet underground waters is the one who can.

What that clay is mixed with is the darkest turn in the story, and it belongs in full to a companion piece on the composite stuff of the human being; here it is enough to say the recipe demanded a death. On an appointed day a god was slaughtered in the assembly, chosen for his intelligence rather than for any guilt, and the birth-goddess worked his flesh and his blood into the clay while the lesser gods spat upon it, binding their own part into the clay.

From that mixture the first humans were formed, and something of the dead god was left inside the living as a lasting sign. The workforce had been manufactured, and the price of the making was one of their own.

The goddess marks the finished act with a boast delivered straight back to the gods who ordered it. You set me the task and I have done it, she says; you have slaughtered a god along with his intelligence, and I have lifted your heavy labour and laid your drudgery on man. I have released the yoke; I have brought restoration. The gods answer with their bodies. They run to her and kiss her feet, and give her a new name for what she has done. Once we called you Mami, they say; now let your name be Belet-kala-ili, Mistress of all the gods. The strike is broken and the midwife crowned in the same breath.

The gentler making across the border

The Babylonians were not the only people in Mesopotamia to tell this story, and an older Sumerian poem tells it without a drop of blood. Enki and Ninmaḫ survives on school tablets copied around the same early second millennium that produced our fullest Atra-hasis manuscript, though the tradition behind it runs back further, and it is a genuinely different myth rather than a version of the same one.

The premise is shared, gods worn out by toil and complaining of it, but the cast and the method are not. Here it is Namma, the primeval mother, who gathers the tears of the gods and carries them to Enki asleep in the deep, begging him to fashion a substitute so the gods can be freed from their work.

Enki’s instruction here is craft, not killing. Knead clay from the top of the abzu, he says, and let the birth-goddesses nip off the clay while you bring the form into being. A team of goddesses does the pinching, chief among them Ninmaḫ, and no god dies to supply the mixture. The poem then turns strange: at a feast, Enki and Ninmaḫ drink beer and fall to wagering, and Ninmaḫ shapes six humans with damaged bodies to test whether Enki can find each a place in the world.

He can, and does, giving every one a station, so that the myth doubles as an account of why the world holds people the ordinary pattern did not produce. The two makings are worth keeping apart rather than folding the tears and the nipped clay into the story of the slaughtered god.

What the making cost, in the end

The Atra-hasis poet does not stop at the crowning of the midwife, and the last turn is the one that gives the whole thing its shape. Humankind, once made, multiplied. Their clamour rose until it disturbed the very gods they had been built to serve, and that noise drives the long second half of the epic, the plagues and the drought and at last the Flood. When the waters have receded, Enki gives the birth-goddess a final and terrible instruction. You, creatress of destinies, establish death for all peoples. Mortality is not built into the first humans; it is decreed here, after the deluge, as a curb.

And it does not come alone. The same passage institutes a woman who does not bear, and a she-demon, the pašittu, who snatches the baby from the lap of the one who bore it, and orders of priestesses kept from childbearing, all of it to cut human numbers down. Stillbirth, infant death, and religious celibacy are set in place as deliberate policy by the same gods who made the race.

The poem that began with immortal gods too worn out to keep digging ends by handing their exhaustion, their labour, and now their death down to the creature they built to replace them. The story of humankind closes in Atra-hasis with a ledger balanced, a god’s lost ease repaid out of the life of the thing that took his place.

Every one of us gods has declared war. Excessive drudgery has killed us; our forced labour was heavy, the misery too much. Now every one of us gods has resolved on a reckoning with Enlil. (Atra-hasis I, tr. after B. R. Foster)