Old Babylonian poem, standard edition by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard (1969), which narrates the mutiny of the lesser gods against forced labour, the making of a human being to carry the work in their place, and a flood sent later to reduce the noise the new species makes. It is the oldest surviving account of human creation as a labour-saving measure, and the closest Mesopotamian parallel to the flood of Genesis.
It is the load-bearing text for the part of this literature that has travelled furthest from its source. Zecharia Sitchin reads the mutiny as a strike in the gold mines, the Primitive Worker as Homo sapiens engineered from a hominid stock by Anunnaki genetics, and the later grant of procreation as an unauthorised act lying behind the Eden story. The claim that humans were made as a slave species is now repeated with no reference to Sitchin and none to this poem, which is what makes the entry worth having: the tablet is published in translation, and a reader can measure the distance for themselves.
Assyriology reads it as a theological account of why humans exist and why they die, in a genre with the Enuma Elish rather than in a genre with reportage. Nothing in the text describes mining, genetics or a home planet; the mother goddess mixes clay with the flesh and blood of a slain god.
Connections
Anunnaki · Zecharia Sitchin · The Wars of Gods and Men · Enuma Elish · Nefilim · Erra Epic · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Enlil · Enki