Nammu, Abzu and Apsu

Referring to G. Leick in her book "Sex and Eroticism in Mesopotamian Literature", the author begins the book by providing an overview of the sexuality of cosmological creation. In the process, she gives the following descriptions of theology of Eridu, and Nammu (p.12):




"Without trying to submit Mesopotamian mythology to a geographical reductionism it is worth considering that the natural features of a landscape do at times inform the imagery of mythical language. This is very obviously the case in much of the Australian or Native American material, but the impact of mountain peaks, rivers, lakes and springs etc. is almost ubiquitous.
My division of the Mesopotamian system into a 'southern' and 'northern' model tries to correlate the terms 'Eridu' and 'Nippur' theology with their geographical situation. But it should not be taken as the basis of a binary orientation affecting Mesopotamian thought. Sumerian tradition held that 'after kingship had descended from Heaven, Eridu became the first seat of kingship.'
Eridu (the modern name of the site is Abu Shahrein) was situated at the edge of the great marshes. With their characteristic reed thickets and wide lagoons, they survive precariously in southern Iraq. The marshes have water in abundance but little stable land which can be used for large-scale growing of crops. Survival depends on a careful adaption of the peculiar ecological conditions, and is not conductive to significant increase of population. The classical Mesopotamian civilization, however, was bad on surplus production of cereals, made possible by putting normally arid zones under the plough and irrigating the land by an intricate system of canals, dikes and ditches.

In these basically desert conditions, was was of fundamental importance to the economy. It became one of the most significant symbols for representing well-being, fertility and creation. The marshes of the South may well have actually been one of the oldest habitats of Mesopotamia (Green 1975: 47-50), as the native tradition always mentioned. Their proximity to the wide lagoons contributed to the formation of the so called Eridu theology. The basic symbol associated with Eridu is ENGUR (Labat No.484); its mail temple was called E.engura. The same sign preceded by the symbol for 'water' was used as a determinative for waterways, river, canal, lake, etc. The realm of the divine in this context is not the sky or the earth, but water. The sign ENGUR can also be read as nammu. This is a synonym of abzu, which is usually translated 'watery deep' or 'sweet water ocean' and defined as the subterranean source of water that emerges from the ground, from wells and springs, not rain-water. The importance of the abzu is well recognized in the ritual. Temples thought Mesopotamia and throughout history had basins or pools to symbolize and represent the abzu. Sumerian texts describe the abzu as lying below the surface of the earth, where the water deity lives. In later mythological texts, most notably the Babylonian Enuma eliš..Apsû (the Akkadian form of abzu) is personified as male.

The Sumerian personification of ENGUR was female and called Nammu. God-lists and other texts describe her as 'the mother who gave birth to Heaven and Earth', 'mother, first one, who gave birth to the gods of the universe' or as 'Mother of Everything'. She is a goddess without a spouse, the self-procreating womb, the primal matter, the inherently fertile and fertilizing waters of the abzu. Nammu stands for the female sex as th one apparently able to create spontaneously, as expressed in the hymn to the temple of Eridu; 'E.engura, womb of abundance.' Nammu does not play a significant role in the corpus of texts that has survived, nor was she much of a mythological personality. She may either belong to an older stratum of Sumerian or pre-Sumerian deities who do not become subjects of literary compositions, or owe her appearance in the hymns and god-lists to a tendency to anthropomorphize general concepts such as abzu or ENGUR and thereby integrate it into' the Sumerian pantheon but without really becoming a 'character'."






"In the Babylonian tradition, ENGUR, the self-contained prima materia, is split into two components, Apsû and Tiāmat. Grammatically speaking, Apsū is masculine and Tiāmat (etymologically related to the Semitic word for 'sea') is feminine. The 'Single Mother' matrix is hereby replaced by a couple to represent the primary constituents of the universe. The important Babylonian text from the late second millennium, called Enuma Eliš after its initial words, describes the beginning of the universe:

When on high heaven had not (yet) been created,
Earth below had not (yet) been brought into being,
When Apsû primeval, their begetter,
and Tiāmat, their progenitress,
(Still) mingled their waters together,
When no grassland had been formed, no reed thicket laid out,
When no gods whatever brought into being,
Were not yet existent, their destinies undetermined,
(At that time) the gods created within them

"



Leick speculates at the reason why the Babylonians differentiated from the Sumerian tradition of Nammu as the self procreating womb, and split the concept into Tiāmat the salt waters and Apsû (the Akk. abzu):

"For the sake of symmetry and perhaps for the benefit of an audience not longer familiar with matrilinear references, the primal matter was artificially divided into complimentary, male-female elements. But the older model of a singular source of life is still easily recognizable."

In the text Enki and Ninmah Namma plays a role in the creation of mankind. The ETCSL translation of line 30:

My mother, the creature you planned will really come into existence. Impose on him the work of carrying baskets.

Namma kneads clay from the Abzu into the human form, and then gives birth to the creation while Ninmah and birth-goddesses stand by. Jacobsen in his review article of Sumerian Mythology explains this as the watery deep (Namma) bringing up silt and depositing it on the shore (Ninmah), similar to the formation of alluvial Mesopotamia itself.

W. G. Lambert, in 'Myth and Mythmaking in Sumer and Akkad' in Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, states that "three literary myths expound the idea of the human race being made from clay and divine blood: the Sumerian Enki and Ninmakh, the Babylonian Atrakhasis Epic, and the Babylonian Epic of Creation."

Where is the blood in the Sumerian story? Well Lambert provides a literal translation of line 30:

Mother, there is the blood you set aside; impose on it the hard labor of the gods.

The word mud in this line would be an obscure point, where it can mean "to create" but also "blood." This translation would reveal the text's similarity to the Babylonian creation stories, especially Atrahasis which relates the hard labour and rebellion of the working gods.

Secrecy and the Engur

The name of Namma is written with the sign ENGUR [=Akkadian apsû], which is listed in the PSD as LAGABxHAL, i.e. the sign LAGAB with the sign HAL written in the middle of it:



One of the meanings of the sign HAL is pirištu "secret." Does this meaning apply here? We shall see.


Simo Parpola understands the word Abzu [ZU.AB] as composed of ab "sea" and zu "gnosis/wisdom," (and notes an epithet of the Apsû in Šurpu tablet II line 149: bīt nēmeqi "home of wisdom") and he explains that

The chief synonym of abzu, engur, was from the earliest times written with an infixed hal, 'secret', and thus must likewise have been associated with esoteric "wisdom."
["Monotheism in Ancient Assyria," in One God or Many? p. 176 n. 24]


Alan Lenzi supplies more examples in his comprehensive study of secrecy:

An OB lexical list equates the Sumerian hal.an.kù, "secret of the pure heaven," with Akkadian ap-sú-ú-um, Ea's subterranean watery domain. Ea's sanctuary in Esagil was called é.hal.an.ki, "House of the Secrets of Heaven and Earth." Lastly and most interesting is an OB royal inscription from Malgium (RIMEP E4.11.1 Ipiq-Eštar) that attests a very revealing epithet for Ea.

8. wa-ši-ib ZU.<AB>-im be-el pi-ri-iš-tim
The one who dwells in the Apsu, the lord of the secret council
[Secrecy and the Gods, pp. 104-105]


Lenzi also notes the hal.an.kù appearing in the Enki and Ninmah text:
At the word of his mother Namma, Enki rose up from his bed.
In Hal-an-kug, his room for pondering, he slapped his thigh in annoyance.

This room for pondering is within the Engur. The Engur itself is described as a secret place:
At that time, the one of great wisdom, the creator of all the senior gods,
Enki lay on his bed, not waking up from his sleep,
In the deep Engur, in the subterranean water, the place the inside of which no other god knows.

It seems that only Namma has access to this secret place; she takes the tears of the gods there, for the gods cannot do so themselves. It is also only Namma who can bring things out from the secret place, for not only did Enki himself come from her womb, but so did mankind (made from clay brought up from the Abzu), and also Heaven and Earth (^dama-tu-an-ki). Leick tells us (Sex and Eroticism, p. 15) that Namma is the dynamic creative aspect of Engur, whereas the Apsu is the inert physical element - thus Namma can be seen as an active intermediary between the normal world (Earth) and the secret world (Engur), bringing things down to it and things back up out of it.

It is surely no coincidence that the same text which reflects the secret nature of Engur is also the one where Namma makes her most prominent appearance. I conclude that the HAL sign in her name is definitely read "secret."

> bilingual version of Enki and Ninmah <

I was fortunate enough to take a look at Lambert's article, "The Relationship of Sumerian and Babylonian Myth as Seen in Accounts of Creation"


Line 30 of the text:
ama.mu (! tablet: .ni) mud.mu.gar.ra.zu ì.gál.la.àm zub.sìg dingir.re.e.ne kéš.da.ì


Lambert translation:
My mother, there is my/the blood which you set aside, impose on it the corvée of the gods.

C. A. Benito (1969) translation:
My mother, the creature on whom you have set (your mind) will really exist. Impose on him the work to carry baskets.

S. N. Kramer/J. Maier (1989) translation:
My mother, the creature whose name you fixed - it exists. The corvée of the gods has been forced on it.

J. J. A. van Dijk (1964) translation:
Ma^! mère, au résultat de ce que tu auras créé, lie les travaux forcés des dieux.

T. Jacobsen (1987) translation:
O mother mine, since the sire (who was once) provided with heir by you is still here, have the god's birth-chair (?) put together!


Lambert discusses the problems of the text and the bilingual version (p. 129f.):
It is agreed everywhere that the text is extremely difficult . . . the easily understandable Babylonian version it offers has been in effect ignored. It has not been taken seriously, as though modern scholars know the meaning of the Sumerian much better, which is certainly untrue. The present writer contends that generally speaking it is reliable, and that its renderings can be confirmed from the Babylonian lexical tradition generally in certain cases. As so understood the text uses many of the traditions about man's creation that are known from Atra-hasīs. It might be replied of course that the Akkadian renderings, whether also supported by the Babylonian lexical tradition or not, are false, being influenced by the Babylonian ideas found in Atra-hasīs. In principle this is possible, but the issue will not be settled on a theoretical basis, but by consideration of each item in turn, which will be undertaken for appropriate lines here.


Lambert does not provide this Babylonian version in his article, only the Sumerian, though I assume his translation is faithful to the bilingual (I'm guessing that the Sumerian mud is rendered as damu in the bilingual).

Some fragments of the bilingual were transliterated by R. Borger in Or. 54, but there are still more pieces that have not been published.

[ I briefly looked at Borger's article on my way out, but I could not make heads or tails of it ]

A major question I would ask would be whether any god in Sumerian mythology created Nammu, and whether all Sumerian records say that the motherly Nammu (waters) birthed the major father god An (sky)? Or do some records call An "uncreated"?

One website mentions a Sumerian tablet saying Nammu birthed An:


Another website repeats this and mentions something interesting about Sumerian metaphysics:

What do you think?