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The Story of Atrahasis
The Story of Atrahasis
Just as you put a wooden spatula into a beehive-shaped brick oven to remove the bricks (like getting the
pizza out when it's done), the womb-goddess or midwife uses a staff to check to see if the womb has
dilated enough for birth. After the seven men and seven women are born, the birth-goddess gives rules
for celebrations at birth: they should last for nine days during which a mud brick should be put down. After
nine days, the husband and wife could resume conjugal relations.
Atrahasis, part I questions
1. How are the reasons for creating man (and woman?) different from those given in Genesis? What
differences do you see in the relations between men and gods?
2. Compare Geshtu-e ("ear"), the god who is sacrificed to make mankind, to Kvasir.
3. Why bricks?
4. Can you find a "fall" or introduction of evil in this story?
5. How is the dispute between the gods like / unlike the war between Zeus and the Titans, or that between
the Vanir and the Aesir?
population and noise problem. Enki and the womb-goddess Nintu decide that henceforth one-third of the
women will not give birth successfully: a pasittu demon will "snatch the baby from its mother's lap" (Dalley
35). They also create several classes of temple women who are not allowed to have children.
Atrahasis, part II questions
1. Why do you think would Enlil want to wipe out men relatively soon (1200 years) after they were
created? (Is it just the noise?) Compare Enlil's motives for wiping out mankind with Yahweh's in the
Genesis flood story.
2. Why do you suppose Enki champions men? Compare him to Prometheus ("forethought"). How is the
end of the story like / unlike the Pandora story?
3. Thorkild Jacobsen writes: "The modern reader may well feel that Enlil, easily frightened, ready to
weep . . . insensitive to others, frustrated at every turn by the clever Enki, cuts a rather poor figure. Not
so! The ultimate power of Enlil, the flood, stuns ancient imagination and compels respect" (121). What
do you think of Enlil's actions?
4. Contrast this image of a supreme being with the god depicted in Genesis.
5. What do you think it means that the gods "gathered like flies" around the sacrifice? If this is a story
about the relations between gods and men, is there a moral to it?
6. Why do you suppose it is the mother-goddess who is particularly appalled at the destruction?
7. What do you think of Enki's solution to the noise problem? In what ways can you relate the end of the
story (flies, controlling childbirth) to the beginning about the creation of humans?
8. What facts of life does this story explain?
Works Cited
Dalley, Stephanie, ed. and trans. Myths from Mesopotamia. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Heidel, Alexander, ed. and trans. The Babylonian Genesis. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1951.
Pritchard, James B., ed. The Ancient Near East, Volume 1: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1958.
- - -. Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1955.
Abbreviated ANET.
Sandars, N[ancy] K. Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia. New York: Penguin,
1971.