Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Plate 1 A seated god with two streams of water flowing from his shoulders, fish swimming in them

Enki (Ea)

Enki, called Ea in Akkadian, was the Mesopotamian god of the fresh waters beneath the earth, of wisdom and of magic. On cylinder seals he is a bearded god in a horned cap with a stream of water full of fish flowing around him.

Mesopotamian symbols and gods. Also called ea, enki god, enki symbol, sumerian god of water.

Meaning

Enki is the Sumerian name and Ea the Akkadian one of a god who, in Ruth Horry’s entry for the Oracc guide to the gods, ranked with Anu and Enlil among the three most powerful in the pantheon. He lived in the abzu, the ocean under the earth, and his city was Eridu in southern Mesopotamia, where his temple was the E-abzu, “house of the abzu”. He was the god of wisdom, magic and incantations, the source of the ritual knowledge that exorcists used to drive out evil, and the patron of arts and crafts; because of his water, the guide adds, he was also the patron of cleaners. Poets called him Nudimmud, “stag of the abzu” and “little Enlil”. In the myths he is the clever god who created humans and saved them from the flood. He is known today from Sumerian and Akkadian literature and from images in museum collections.

Origin and history

Enki first appears in texts from Fara in the Early Dynastic IIIa period. When he merged with Ea, whose name is first found in the twenty-fourth century BC, is not clear. His long career ended in Greek: as late as the third century BC, a Greek text attributed to the Babylonian priest Berossus calls him Kronos.

The Sumerian poems of the second millennium BC give him the largest role in making the land fertile and its cities civilised. In Enki and Ninhursanga he turns the salt marshes of Tilmun into farmland with sweet water from the abzu. In Enki and the World Order he praises himself (“I brought the arts and crafts from the E-kur, the house of Enlil, to my Abzu in Eridug”) and then travels the land decreeing the fate of each place. In the Babylonian flood myth, Atra-hasīs, Ea plans the creation of humans from clay to do the gods’ work, and when Enlil sends a flood to wipe them out because their noise keeps him awake, Ea warns the sage Atrahasis to build an ark. The Penn Museum points out that the Sumerian flood story already gives the god of wisdom and magic the central role in humanity’s survival. His son was Marduk, and later prayers against evil invoked Ea, Šamaš and Marduk together: Ea gave the spell, Marduk carried it out and Šamaš purified.

How to recognise him

Ea is a bearded god in a horned cap and long robes. Cylinder seals often show him surrounded by a flowing stream with fish swimming in it, the waters of the abzu; the scribe Adda’s seal in the British Museum, from about 2300–2200 BC, shows him with the stream beside his two-faced minister Isimu. His other emblems, Horry writes, are a curved sceptre with a ram’s head, a goat-fish and a turtle. In the Sumerian poem Ninurta and the Turtle, Enki makes a turtle from the clay of the abzu that drags the hero Ninurta into a pit after he keeps the stolen tablet of destinies for himself. On a Babylonian boundary stone in the Louvre, the catalogue lists Ea’s emblems as an antelope, a fish, a house, a club and a ram.

Often confused with the fish-cloaked sages

Assyrian reliefs from the temple of Ninurta at Kalhu (Nimrud) show figures dressed in the skin of a fish. In the early twentieth century these were taken for Ea, and Horry calls that identification incorrect: they are apkallu, the sages who lived with him in the abzu and sometimes took a half-man, half-fish form. Sarah Graff, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, describes the apkallu as the seven sages who lived before the flood in the land of sweet waters, the domain of wisdom, and calls them “the connection to the original wisdom of the earth before humans”.

Enki and the Anunna

The Anunna (Akkadian Anunnaki) were the highest gods of the Sumerian pantheon, and Enki stands at their head in his own poem. Enki and the World Order names him “lord of plenty of the Anuna gods”, and after he praises himself “the Anuna gods stood there in prayer and supplication”. According to Nicole Brisch’s Oracc entry on the Anunna, one of their main tasks in the same poem is to decide the fates; the name most likely means something like “those of princely seed”, and no picture of them as a group is known. In Inana’s Descent the Anuna are the seven judges of the underworld, and it is Enki alone who sends help to bring Inanna back.

Enki and Inanna

In the poem Inana and Enki the two drink beer together in the abzu, and Enki, drunk, gives the goddess the divine powers of civilisation, “in the name of my power, in the name of my abzu”. She sails off with them in the Boat of Heaven, and when he sends his minister Isimud after her, she will not give them back.

See also

Inanna (Ishtar), Anunnaki (Anunna), Cuneiform, Star of Ishtar, Mušḫuššu (the Ishtar Gate dragon), Lamassu.

Sources

  1. Enki/Ea (god) (Ruth Horry, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Ruth Horry, “Enki/Ea (god)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
  2. Enki and the world order (ETCSL 1.1.3), The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, t.1.1.3, English translation, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, page text
  3. Inana and Enki (ETCSL 1.3.1), The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, t.1.3.1, English translation, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, page text
  4. Anunna (Anunnaku, Anunnaki) (Nicole Brisch, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Nicole Brisch, “Anunna (Anunnaku, Anunnaki) (a group of gods)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2024, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
  5. The uses of writing (Steve Tinney, Expedition, Penn Museum), Steve Tinney, “The Uses of Writing: Inscribed Objects and Texts in the Middle East Galleries”, Expedition 60/1 (2018), University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, page text
  6. Spotlight: Keeping culture alive (The Met, 2022), The Met, Perspectives, “Spotlight: Keeping Culture Alive”, August 2022: Sarah Graff (associate curator, Ancient Near Eastern Art) and Sargon Donabed (Roger Williams University), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, page text
  7. Kudurru de Meli-Shipak, Sb 22 (Louvre), Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales, Sb 22, collections database entry, Musée du Louvre, page text

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or squares and rectangles.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

Added .

Report a problem

Please don’t include personal details.