How can you not love the name of this ancient city? Eridu sounds like the invention of a wickedly talented fantasy author. Founded in 5400 B.C.E., Eridu was built on a sand dune, a place of heightened elevation on the boringly flat plains of Mesopotamia.
And when explorers in the Middle East began wearing Indiana Jones clothing and unearthing ancient tombs and libraries, they were largely interested in two things: treasure and Bible research.
That is how an ancient story, a copy of which was written on clay tablets around 1600 B.C.E., came to be called "Eridu Genesis." The first translators wanted to compare it to the biblical book.
Of course, it would be the writers of Genesis (see Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? to learn more about that) who alluded to Sumerian works and not the other way around. So maybe Genesis should be called "The Eridu-like Creation Epic." There may be allusions to this ancient story in the Hebrew text of Genesis (if not allusions, a similarity of style, especially in the Priestly strand of Genesis such as chapter 1).
Eridu Genesis talks about An, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursaga fashioning "the dark-headed people," a reference to the Sumerians. Nintur, the birth goddess, inspired people to build cities with temples where she and other gods could cool themselves in the heat of the day. It describes kingship as an institution founded by the gods to help people thrive.
A part of the story that was lost in the older tablets—but which we know from other versions of the same story—tells us that the god Enlil couldn't bear the noise humans made. We kept him awake. So he flooded the world to destroy us and get some peace and quiet.
But Enki had mercy and gave instructions to the "Mesopotamian Noah" (called Ziusudra in the oldest texts and Utnapishtim in later texts). Some parts of the story remain in the tablets from 1600 B.C.E. and others we know from later versions. Enki told Ziusudra to build an ark.
Enlil wasn't happy, but Enki worked some diplomacy and in the end Ziusudra was rewarded for his faith and courage. The gods made him immortal.
Myth has been defined as literature attempting to answer existential questions of great import. Why are human beings the way we are? Why do we live in cities with rulers over us? Why do we have religions and rituals?
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