Akkadian Ea, the god of the sweet waters of the Abzu, of craft, cunning and incantation, patron of Eridu, and the most narratively active figure in the Mesopotamian pantheon. His rank number is 40.
What he does in the texts
He makes humanity, with the mother goddess, to bear the labour of the gods after their mutiny in the Atra-Hasis Epic; he warns the flood survivor against Enlil’s decree, by the device of speaking to a reed wall rather than to a man; he is robbed of the me, the offices and instruments of civilisation, by Inanna; and in Enki and Ninmah he and the mother goddess make a series of malformed beings in a drinking contest, a passage that catalogues congenital conditions with some precision and is the most genuinely striking text in the whole ancient-astronaut argument.
In the ancient-astronaut reading
He is the scientist of Zecharia Sitchin’s account: firstborn of Anu but disinherited by the succession rule, leader of the first landing party, and the engineer of the Primitive Worker. Heather Lynn keeps the engineering and drops the aliens, reading the making of humanity as selective breeding by a human elite in The Anunnaki Connection. Both hang on translations the standard lexica do not carry.
Connections
Enlil · Anu · Anunnaki · Atra-Hasis Epic · Inanna · Marduk · Zecharia Sitchin · The Wars of Gods and Men · The Anunnaki Connection · Heather Lynn · Apkallu