The Sumerian Tablet That Says Enki Needed Humans for Himself — And Describes What For

Enki and Ninmah is a Sumerian text that opens with the gods already at work. 🌍⚒️ The senior gods oversee things while the minor gods carry the toil, digging canals and piling up silt, and they begin complaining about this life. 😩🪣 Nammu, the primeval mother who gave birth to the senior gods, takes their tears to her son Enki, who is asleep, and tells him to wake up. 😢💤 She asks him to use his wisdom to create a substitute for the gods so they can be freed from their toil. 🧠🙏 Enki agrees and tells her to knead clay from the top of the abzu, with the birth goddesses helping, and to give the new being the work of carrying baskets. 🧺🏺 So the text gives the purpose as relief for the gods, set in motion by Nammu, and says nothing about Enki needing humans for himself. 🔍⚖️ The story then turns into a feast and a contest, where Ninmah shapes flawed people and Enki finds each one a role, then makes a being of his own that Ninmah can't fix. 🍺🎭 The text ends with Ninmah unable to rival Enki, though parts of the tablet are broken and some lines are uncertain. 🧩📖 In this video, we walk through the tablet in order and show what survives and what is missing, keeping what the text says apart from what later retellings have added. 📚
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