God of Wisdom and the Deep
Enki, called Ea in Akkadian, is the god of wisdom, fresh water, and crafts. He dwells in the Abzu, the subterranean freshwater deep, and his holy city is Eridu — in Sumerian tradition the first city of all — where his temple was the E-abzu, 'House of the Deep.' Akkadian cylinder seals such as the Adda seal in the British Museum show him with two fish-filled streams springing from his shoulders and a many-horned crown; his emblem beast is the goat-fish, which stands for him on later boundary stones. Among the gods he is the schemer and problem-solver, master of spells and keeper of the me, the arts of civilization.
He repeatedly shields humankind. In the Atrahasis epic, when the junior gods strike against their toil, Enki proposes creating humans to do the work, shaped from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slaughtered god; when Enlil later sends the Flood, Enki leaks the secret through a reed wall and teaches Atrahasis to build the ark. In the Sumerian poem Inanna and Enki he drunkenly gives away the me one by one to Inanna and sobers up to find them shipped off to Uruk. Enki and Ninhursag sets him in the pure land of Dilmun, sickened by eating eight plants and healed by eight deities created for the purpose.
In Enuma Elish, as Ea, he becomes the father of Marduk: he lulls and kills the primeval freshwater Apsu with a spell, founds his dwelling upon the body, and later fashions mankind from the blood of Qingu. At Eridu, modern Tell Abu Shahrain, the temple sequence reaches back to the sixth millennium BCE, one of the longest continuous sacred sites in Mesopotamia.
