Ninhursag- Mesopotamian GodDeity"Lady of the Mountain"

Clay and Feast

In "Enki and Ninmah," the gods were digging canals and piling earth to keep the world running, and they were exhausted. Their complaints reached Enki, who lay sleeping in the primordial waters. His mother Nammu woke him and proposed a solution: create beings to carry the gods' burden. Enki agreed, but he did not work alone. He provided the design and the clay from above the Abzu. Ninhursag shaped the figures.

She pinched off fourteen pieces of clay, seven male and seven female, and molded them into human beings. She recited incantations over each one, fixing their fates. The first humans rose and took on the labor the gods had abandoned: digging channels and building temples.

A feast followed. Enki and Ninhursag drank deep, and then Ninhursag issued a challenge: she would create beings with impairments, and Enki must find each one a useful place in society. She made a blind man; Enki assigned him the role of musician. She made a man whose hands could not close; Enki placed him in the king's service. For each flawed creation, Enki found a function.

Then Enki took his turn. He fashioned a being so feeble and helpless it could do nothing at all. He called it Umul, "my day is far off." Ninhursag could assign it no role. She could not match what Enki had done to her, and the contest ended in her anger.

The Slaughter of We-ilu

The Atrahasis Epic tells a different creation. Here the birth goddess, called Mami, follows a bloodier path. The god We-ilu, described as a deity "who had intelligence," is slaughtered. His flesh and blood are mixed with clay so that the resulting humans carry both mortal substance and divine spirit. The text says a drumbeat was heard from the clay: the heartbeat of the new being, animated by divine blood.

Mami pinched off fourteen pieces of the mixture, placing seven to the right and seven to the left, with a birthing brick between them. This was the brick upon which Mesopotamian women knelt during labor, the brick of Nintu. Midwives invoked the mother goddess to ease the birth and protect both mother and child.

Paradise in Dilmun

"Enki and Ninhursag" is set in Dilmun, a paradise often identified with Bahrain: a place with no sickness and no aging. The land was pure but lacked fresh water. Enki commanded the sun god Utu to bring water from the earth, and Dilmun bloomed.

Then Enki turned his attention to Ninhursag. He lay with her, and after a pregnancy lasting nine days she bore a daughter, the goddess Ninsar. Enki lay with Ninsar, who bore Ninkurra. Enki lay with Ninkurra, who bore the weaver goddess Uttu. Each generation arrived in nine days.

Uttu, however, had been warned by Ninhursag. When Enki came to her, she demanded proper courtship gifts: cucumbers and grapes. Enki brought them, and Uttu admitted him. But Ninhursag intervened. She removed Enki's seed from Uttu's body and planted it in the ground.

The Eight Plants

From Enki's seed, eight plants sprang up, plants never seen before, whose names and natures were unknown. Enki, curious as ever, had his minister Isimud fetch each one. He tasted them all and determined their natures, consuming every last plant.

Ninhursag had created those plants. Enki had devoured them without her leave, without asking, without knowing their purpose. She pronounced a curse: "Until his dying day, I shall never look upon him with life-giving eye." Then she vanished.

Eight parts of Enki's body began to fail: his jaw, his rib, one after another, each sickened as the curse took hold. The gods were alarmed. Without Enki, the world's wisdom and water would perish. No god could lift Ninhursag's curse. A fox, the only creature willing to approach the enraged mother goddess, persuaded her to return.

Ninhursag sat Enki beside her and asked, one by one, "My brother, what hurts you?" For each ailing part she birthed a healing deity. For his jaw she bore Ninsitu. For his tooth, Ninsutu. For his rib, Nin-ti, whose name in Sumerian means both "Lady of the Rib" and "Lady of Life," because ti carries both meanings.

The Clay Cast into the Wild

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the people of Uruk cry out for a match to their overbearing king. The gods call on Aruru. She washes her hands, pinches off a piece of clay, and throws it into the wilderness. From that clay rises Enkidu: shaggy, naked, running with the gazelles, knowing nothing of bread or cities. He is Ninhursag's creature in every sense, born of her clay, dwelling in her mountains, an animal among animals until a woman from Uruk leads him away.

Kesh and Tell al-'Ubaid

Ninhursag's temple stood at Kesh, a city whose location is lost but whose hymn survives. The Kesh Temple Hymn describes wild animals gathering at the temple while the mother goddess nurses the young.

At Tell al-'Ubaid near Ur, King A-annepadda of the First Dynasty of Ur dedicated a temple to her around 2500 BCE. The ruins yielded copper reliefs of lions and a copper lintel showing the Imdugud bird seizing deer. Mesopotamian kings claimed Ninhursag had nursed them, that they had drunk divine milk that set them apart from ordinary mortals. Her symbol, the omega sign on seals and boundary stones, almost certainly represents the uterus: the cosmic mother bound to the act of birth.