Toward the Light

Tag: Oannes

  • Anunnaki are amphibious

    Anunnaki are amphibious

    I think I can see why Mesopotamians were so fond of the Anunnaki.

    Post outline

    1. Adapa and his family are amphibious
    2. Enki is amphibious and equivalent to the Nommo
    3. Adapa and Enki are the same entity
    4. References

    1. Adapa and his family are amphibious

    About Adapa:

    • Born to Anunnaki parents. According to authentic Mesopotamian texts, the offspring of Enki (divine and Anunnaki) and his wife Damgalnunna/Damkina (divine and probably Anunnaki) were the gods Marduk, Asarluhi and Enbilulu, the goddess Nanše and the sage Adapa.1,2
    • Names and role. Adapa’s full name is Uanadapa or U-Adapa, U-Anna, also known as Uanna and Oannes, after Babylonian priest Berossus hellenized the name Uanna into Oannes. He is traditionally identified as the first of the seven wisdom sages (Apkallu) in Mesopotamian mythology and the chief sage of Eridu.3,4,5
    • Adapa is amphibious. Berossus (3rd Century BCE), a Babylonian priest of Marduk who wrote the Babyloniaca6 explicitly recorded that a creature named Oannes [Adapa] emerged from the Persian Gulf to teach civilization to mankind. In the surviving Greek fragments of his text, Berossus explicitly calls Oannes “amphibious” (amphibion), describing him as a monster with the body of a fish but with a human head beneath the fish’s head, and human feet beneath the tail.7,8

    As Adapa is amphibious, it can be reasonably assumed that his parents, siblings, and the Anunnaki in general, are also amphibious.

    2. Enki is amphibious and equivalent to the Nommo

    The above information indicates that Enki (Sumerian) / Ea (Akkadian), the Anunnaki god of freshwater, wisdom, creation, and magic, is amphibious like his son Adapa. This conclusion is reinforced by the similarity of Enki to the Nommo (amphibious beings discussed in Spiritual Light in Africa: The Dogon Tribe):

    Water domain

    • Enki. Lord of the abzu, the subterranean freshwater abyss beneath the earth.
    • Nommo. “Masters of the Water”; name means “to make one drink.”

    Fish/Aquatic Imagery

    • Enki. Depicted with streams of water and swimming fish flowing from his shoulders; symbols include a goat-fish, turtle, and water-serpent.
    • Nommo. Fish-like lower body; accompanied by fish, crocodiles, turtles, catfish.

    Wisdom/Teaching

    • Enki. God of wisdom, magic, incantations, crafts; patron of craftspeople; keeper of the me (divine decrees).
    • Nommo. “The Teachers” — brought speech, law, weaving, agriculture, metallurgy.

    Creation of Humanity

    • Enki. Created humans from clay; called the god “whose hands created mankind”; worked with a mother goddess (Ninmah/Belet-ili).
    • Nommo. Divided their bodies to feed and give life to humans; “the universe had drunk of his body.”

    Cosmic Position

    • Enki. Son of An (sky) or Nammu (primeval waters); one of the three highest gods (Anu, Enlil, Enki).
    • Nommo. First living creature created by Amma; demi-deities, ancestral spirits.

    Primordial Waters

    • Enki. Born from / dwells in the Abzu; in the Enuma Elish, the first gods arise from the mingling of Tiamat (salt water) and Abzû (fresh water).
    • Nommo. Emerged from the cosmic egg; required a watery environment.

    Trickster/Disorder Element

    • Enki. A trickster — cunning, mischievous, overturns Enlil’s plans; but he is the order-restoring trickster, not the chaos one.
    • Nommo. Ogo (rebel Nommo) became the Pale Fox; disorder vs. order.

    Dual Nature

    • Enki. Human-form, bearded, robed — but his iconography is saturated with water and fish; he straddles the boundary between the dry world and the deep.
    • Nommo. Amphibious — between water and land, human and serpent, male and female.

    3. Adapa and Enki are the same entity

    Consistent with the above indications that Enki is amphibious, scholars have suggested that Adapa/Oannes and Enki are in fact the same divine entity:

    • In his early lectures on Babylonian religion, Archibald Sayce, Professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford from 1891 to 1919, directly supported the idea that Oannes and Ea are one and the same. He argued that Oannes’ attributes as a fish-man bringing civilization from the Persian Gulf perfectly mirrored Ea’s role as the god of the subterranean water (Abzu). Key works in which he identified Oannes and Ea as one and the same deity include “The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia” (1902),9 in which he states:

      “The Chaldæan historian Berossos tells us that the elements of culture, and therewith of the organised religion of a later day, were brought to Babylonia from abroad. Oannes or Ea, the culture-god, had risen morning by morning out of the waters of the Persian Gulf, and instructed the savage races of the shore in the arts of life.”
    • Nineteenth-century French Hellenist, Assyriologist, and archaeologist François Lenormant proposed an etymological link, suggesting Oannes derived from Ea-khan (“Ea the Fish”), viewing the figure as a direct manifestation of the water god (from lectures and publications by Archibald Sayce, including the Gifford Lectures9).

    4. References

    1. Katz, D. (2003). The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources, CDL Press.
    2. The Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses (AMGG) database, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.
    3. Lenzi, A. (2008). The Uruk List of Kings and Sages and Late Mesopotamian Scholarship. Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 8(2), 137–169.
    4. Mark, Joshua J. (2011). The Myth of Adapa, World History Encyclopedia, 23 Feb 2011.
    5. Annus, Amar (2024). The Story of the Watchers as a counter narrative: Enochic responses to the authority of Mesopotamian Sages, MDPI, 23 Aug 2024.
    6. Burstein, Stanley M. (1989). Berossus, Encyclopedia Iranica, 15 Dec 1989, Updated 17 Nov 2016.
    7. Wikipedia: Apkallu
    8. Britannica: Oannes
    9. Gifford Lectures (delivered at Aberdeen University, 1900-1902, p. 385), Publisher T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1902.


    Family from afar