In Mesopotamian tradition the apkallu are seven sages sent by Ea before the flood to bring the arts of civilisation to the first cities, and a further group of human scholars after it. The Uruk List of Kings and Sages, excavated in situ at the Seleucid-era temple of Anu at Bit Res in 1959 and 1960 and translated by Alan Lenzi in 2008, pairs each antediluvian king with his sage and then continues with eight later pairs of king and ummanu, the human scholar. Berossus, writing in Greek in the third century BCE, describes the first of them as Oannes, a being that came out of the Persian Gulf with the body of a fish, and the Bit meseri incantation series calls them the seven brilliant puradu-fish. The standard reading treats them as mythological culture heroes and treats the fish costume in the reliefs as ritual dress worn by human exorcists. The ancient astronaut literature reads them instead as the Anunnaki under another name, a merger that runs through Reymond’s edition of the Edfu building texts and through Amar Annus’s work connecting the apkallu to the Watchers of the Book of Enoch. Heather Lynn takes the further step of arguing that the sages were originally nonhuman and were humanised later, while the ummanu were always human. Nothing in the tablets themselves distinguishes the two claims; the texts describe the sages as sent by a god, which is what they say about a great deal else.
Connections
Anunnaki · Watchers · Nefilim · Enuma Elish · Zecharia Sitchin · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Michael S. Heiser · Robert Temple · Uruk List of Kings and Sages