The Making of the First Humans

Summary

Stories of the making of humans answer three questions: what people were made of, who made them, and why.

The oldest continuous answer we have is the Sumerian poem Enki and Ninmah. In the first days the senior gods oversaw the work while the junior gods dug the canals and piled up the silt, until they complained of this life. Enki lay asleep on his bed in the deep water and would not wake, so his mother Namma took the gods' tears to him and said: get up, my son, and use your wisdom to make a substitute so that the gods can be freed from their toil. Enki rose and told her: knead clay from the top of the Abzu; the birth goddesses will nip off the clay and you will bring the form into being; let Ninmah be your helper; and when you have decreed its fate, let Ninmah impose on it the work of carrying baskets. Enki then held a feast, and he and Ninmah drank beer until their hearts were merry, and Ninmah said: man's body can be good or bad, and I make its fate as I please. Enki answered: whatever fate you decide, I will balance it. She took clay from the Abzu and made a man who could not bend his outstretched hands, and Enki made him a servant of the king; she made another and another, and he found each a way to make a living.

The Akkadian Atrahasis tells the same story at greater length. The junior gods, the Igigi, rebelled against the burden of work. The great gods met and asked the midwife Mami, who is Nintu, to create a first human to bear the yoke, Enlil's work, and carry the basket of the god. She said: this is not for me to do, it is for Enki; let him give me the clay. Enki said: let one god be slaughtered, and with his flesh and blood let Nintu mix clay, so that god and man are mixed together in the clay; let us hear the drumbeat for the rest of time, and from the god's flesh let there be a spirit, a sign not to be forgotten. In their assembly they slaughtered "Wē, who has understanding", Nintu mixed the clay with his flesh and blood, and the Igigi spat upon the clay. Mami said: you ordered me a task and I have completed it; I have laid your heavy toil on man. The gods kissed her feet and said: we used to call you Mami; now let your name be "Mistress of All the Gods". Then she pinched off fourteen pieces of the clay, seven on the right and seven on the left, set a brick between them, drew the reed knife that cuts the umbilical cord, and seven males and seven females came forth.

Other mythologies use other materials. In Babylon humans are made from the blood of the defeated Kingu; in Egypt Khnum makes them on the potter's wheel, or they come from the tears of Ra. In China Nüwa kneads yellow earth and then drags a cord through the mud. Among the Greeks Prometheus makes people from earth and water, and Hephaestus makes the first woman from earth and water. In the North Odin and his brothers find two trees on the seashore and make of them Ask and Embla. In India the orders of people come from the body of Puruṣa; in Persia the first couple grows out of the earth as a single plant. In the Bible and the Qur'an man is made from dust or clay and then breath is blown into him.

These stories agree that a human is made of two things: a material from below, clay, earth, trees, a plant or tears, and something from above that enters it, a god's blood, breath, spirit or the gods' gifts. They differ in the purpose. In Sumer and Babylon people are made to carry the gods' work for them; in China they are made because the earth was empty; in the North they are given names and clothes and then a home in Midgard. The idea the stories turn on is that the earth in a human explains his work, his toil and his death, while what came from above explains his mind and his breath; and the way he was made explains why people are unequal: Ninmah makes different bodies, Nüwa makes the rich with her hands and the poor with the cord, and Puruṣa's body is divided into orders.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Arabic has two names for the human being that go back to skin and to the face of the earth. The first is bashar: in Lane basharah is the outer skin of a person, and some say man is called bashar because his skin is bare of hair and wool; the father of bashar is Adam. The Hindu essay reads Puruṣa's name with this word. The second is Ādam: in Genesis ha-ʾadam is made from the dust of the ʾadamah, the ground, and Brown-Driver-Briggs reports the comparison of ʾadamah with Arabic adīm; in Lane adīm is tanned skin, and adīm al-arḍ is the surface of the earth, though Lane also records the disagreement over the derivation of Adam and quotes the view that it is a foreign, that is Hebrew, word. Clay itself is shared: in Atrahasis Nintu mixes ṭiṭṭa, clay; Akkadian ṭiṭṭu is Hebrew ṭîṭ, mud, and Arabic and Aramaic say ṭīn, which the project's Egyptian essay calls "the first material of creation". And the mind in man is named in the same poem: the slaughtered god is "Wē, who has ṭēmu", and ṭēmu in Akkadian is understanding and counsel; Brown-Driver-Briggs places it with Hebrew ṭaʿam, taste and discernment, and Arabic ṭaʿima. Lane gives rajul dhū ṭaʿm, a man possessed of intelligence and prudence. So the god whose blood was mixed with the clay is, on a reading proposed on the method, dhū al-ṭaʿm, the one with a mind. The text's editors note that one manuscript spells eṭemmu, the ghost that remains of the dead, in a way that recalls the name Wē and the word ṭēmu, so the ghost that remains of a human carries in its sound the mind of the slaughtered god.

Attestations by Culture

Sumer

In Enki and Ninmah humans are made from the clay of the Abzu as an answer to the gods' toil, and then Enki and Ninmah compete: she makes defective bodies and he finds each body a task or a livelihood, so that the man who cannot bend his hands becomes a servant of the king. The Song of the Hoe gives another way: Enlil separates heaven from earth so that humans can grow at a place called "Where Flesh Came Forth", then with his hoe sets the first model of mankind in the brick mould, and his people break through the soil towards him as plants come up. In the epic of Gilgamesh Aruru washes her hands, pinches off a piece of clay and throws it into the wilderness, and Enkidu is created as the king's equal; his page reads his name as "the creature of the lord of the earth".

Akkad and Babylon

In Atrahasis Wē is slaughtered, his flesh and blood are mixed with the clay, the Igigi spit on it, from his flesh comes the ghost, and from the clay come fourteen pieces that become seven couples. The brick is to be set for seven days in the house of the woman giving birth, so the story also founds a birth rite. Before six hundred years had passed people had multiplied and grown so noisy that Enlil could not sleep, and he sent plague, then drought, then the flood. In Tablet VI of Enūma eliš Marduk says: I shall compact blood and cause bones to be, I shall make a lullû stand, and let "Man" be its name; he shall bear the gods' toil so that they may rest. Ea asks that one of the gods be handed over; the assembly names Kingu, who stirred up Tiamat; he is bound, his blood is shed, and from his blood Ea makes humankind. Kingu's page reads his name as qinn, a slave wholly owned, so the humans made from his blood inherit his servitude. The project's Babylonian essay merges the two accounts when it says that Bēlet-ilī mixed the clay with Kingu's blood in Atrahasis; the blood in Atrahasis is Wē's, and Kingu's is in Enūma eliš.

Egypt

Khnum makes a person and his double on the potter's wheel and makes the child in its mother's womb. The hymn at Esna says he fashioned gods, people and herds on his wheel, knotted the blood to the bones, built the skull, opened the eyes and formed the tongue, and that the wheel does not stop afterwards but turns every day. In the Bremner-Rhind Papyrus the "Lord of All" says he wept over Shu and Tefnut when they came back to him with his Eye, and humankind came from the tears of his Eye; the translator notes that the Egyptian words for people and for tears sound alike.

China

The Fengsu tongyi, as quoted in the Taiping yulan, says that when heaven and earth had separated there were no people on the earth, so Nüwa kneaded yellow earth and made people one by one; when the work grew too heavy she dragged a cord through the mud and raised it, and what fell from it became people. That is why the rich and noble are the people of yellow earth and the poor and common are the people of the cord. Nüwa's page reads her name as nawā, to intend and resolve: she made people on purpose. The Chinese Semitic essay sets her yellow clay beside the clay of Adam.

Greece

Apollodorus says that Prometheus moulded people out of water and earth and gave them fire, which he had hidden in a fennel stalk, and Zeus punished him (1.7.1). At Panopeus Pausanias saw two stones the colour of clay that smelt very like human skin; the people there said they were what was left of the clay from which Prometheus made the human race (10.4.4). In Hesiod Zeus tells Hephaestus to mix earth with water and put in it human voice and strength, and Pandora, the first woman, is made (Works and Days 60–82); Hesiod then counts five races of men: golden, silver, a bronze race "sprung from ash trees", the heroes, and the iron race that never rests from toil (109–201). Ovid makes the human that Prometheus shaped from earth and river water stand upright and look at the sky and the stars, while the animals bend towards the ground. Prometheus's page reads his name as al-mubrim, the one who settles a matter before it happens. After the flood Deucalion and Pyrrha make new people from stones.

The North

Völuspá says that three of the Æsir came to a house and found on the land Askr and Embla, of little strength and without fate; they had no breath, no spirit, no softness nor activity, nor good colour; Odin gave breath, Hœnir gave spirit, and Lóðurr gave softness and good colour (17–18); in the next stanza the seeress names the norns who choose the lives of men. Snorri says that the sons of Borr, walking along the seashore, found two trees, took them up and made people of them: the first gave breath and life, the second wit and movement, the third face, speech, hearing and sight; they gave them clothes and names, and their offspring lived in Midgard (Gylfaginning 9), and Midgard itself was made from the eyebrows of Ymir as a stronghold for people against the giants (8). The giants came from Ymir's own body: under his arm a man and a woman grew, and one of his feet begot a son with the other (Gylfaginning 5, Vafþrúðnismál 33). Búri, grandfather of the gods, came out of the salty rime-stone licked by the cow Auðhumla (6), so in this telling each race has its own material: the giants a body, the gods a block of salt, people a tree.

India

In the Puruṣa hymn of the Rigveda the gods divide the first man in the sacrifice: his mouth became the Brahmin, his arms the warrior, his thighs the Vaiśya, and from his feet the Śūdra was born; from his mind came the moon and from his eye the sun (10.90.11–13). The four orders are here limbs of one body, which is what the cosmic body pattern page gathers. The father of mankind is Manu, who survived the flood and for whom Iḍā came out of his offering.

Persia

The Bundahishn tells that Gayomard, the first man, gave forth his seed as he died; the light of the sun purified it, and after forty years Mashya and Mashyana grew up out of the earth in the shape of a one-stemmed rivas plant, a rhubarb, with fifteen leaves, so joined that it was not clear which was male and which female. Then they changed from the shape of a plant into the shape of humans, the soul went into them, and Ahura Mazda told them: you are man, you are the ancestry of the world; do good and worship no demons (15.1–6).

Canaan

No Ugaritic story of the making of humans has survived, but the tablets call El "Creator of Creatures" and "father of humanity". The Canaanite rereading essay says the Canaanites left no complete text on the creation of man and makes Danel, the just judge, their model of the human being.

The Bible and the Qur'an

In Genesis God forms the human from the dust of the ground and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and he becomes a living being (2:7); after the eating from the tree he tells him: by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return (3:19). In the Qur'an: "We created man from sounding clay, from moulded black mud", then "I am creating a human being (bashar) from sounding clay, from moulded black mud; when I have formed him and breathed into him of My spirit, fall down in prostration before him" (15:26–29), and "I am creating a human being from clay" (38:71). The project's Chinese and Hindu essays set Adam, made from clay and dust, against Nüwa and Puruṣa.

Japan

The Kojiki has no story of the making of people. People are named in it when Izanagi flees from the land of the dead: the book writes their name with three characters meaning "green human grass", and at the rock Izanami says she will strangle a thousand of them each day, and he answers that he will set up fifteen hundred birth-huts each day. People here are a growth of which a measure dies every day and more is born.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The material that recurs is clay, the material of the potter and the brickmaker. The gods nip off clay in Enki and Ninmah and Atrahasis, Enlil sets it in the brick mould, Khnum turns it on the wheel, Prometheus kneads it with water, and Nüwa kneads it by hand. In these stories the clay comes from water: from above the Abzu, from the silt of the flood whose source Khnum guards, from river water in Ovid. The primordial waters page gathers the water from which things begin.

In other stories the human grows as a tree grows: Ask and Embla are two trees, Mashya and Mashyana a rhubarb plant, Hesiod's bronze race comes "from ash trees", people in the Kojiki are green grass, and the people of Sumer break through the soil towards Enlil. The name Askr in Old Norse is the ash itself, the tree of Yggdrasil, and his page reads it as Arabic sāq, both the trunk of a tree and the shank of a man, so these stories meet the world tree page. At the end of time people go back to the trees: Líf and Lífþrasir hide in Hoddmímir's wood, and from them the new ages are born (Vafþrúðnismál 45). In Persia the two are joined: after Mashya and Mashyana became human, the text says, a tree grew in that likeness whose fruit was the ten kinds of people.

The part that comes from above differs. In Babylon it is the blood of a slain god: Wē who has understanding in Atrahasis, the defeated Kingu in Enūma eliš. In the Bible and the Qur'an it is breath from God; in the North breath, spirit, softness and colour given by three of the Æsir; among the Greeks the fire Prometheus stole; in Persia a soul entering the plant. In the stories of Puruṣa and Ymir the body itself makes the world, the cosmic body pattern: from Puruṣa come the orders of people, from Ymir the giants, and from his eyebrows the stronghold where people live.

The stories tie the making of humans to what comes after. In Atrahasis people multiply and grow noisy, and Enlil sends the flood; among the Greeks Deucalion and Pyrrha make people again from stones after the flood, so both stories lead into the flood. In the Song of the Hoe humans are made directly after the separation of heaven and earth, and in the Fengsu tongyi likewise after the two have parted. And Prometheus, who makes people and gives them fire, is one of the culture heroes.

Clay is not enough in Enkidu's story: Shamhat completes his making with bread, ale, oil and clothing, and the text says "he became a man"; see Shamhat.

Symbolic Reading

The essay Rereading Babylonian Myths reads the creation of humans to serve the gods as the organisation of imperial labour: the people work to build temples and palaces, a compulsory labour tax. It reads the revolt of the Igigi in Atrahasis as the revolt of the first workers, since digging canals and building ziggurats fell on one class, and reads "man created to work" as corvée and the enslavement of conquered peoples. The essay Rereading Chinese Myths makes Nüwa's making of people from clay an image of pottery. The Hindu Semitic essay joins Adam and ātman, the self in Sanskrit: Adam is the bodily side made from dust, ātman the spiritual side, and the human is both together.

The texts themselves allow a reading from nature and from people's work. The clay from which the human is made is the river clay from which the people of Mesopotamia and Egypt made their houses, their pots and their writing tablets, and Lane notes that the best clay is what remains after the waters subside, and the best of that is the clay of Egypt. The tools of creation are craftsmen's tools: the brick mould, the potter's wheel, and the reed knife that cuts the umbilical cord. And the stories tie the making of the first human to every birth after it: in Atrahasis the brick is set for seven days in the house of the woman giving birth, in Egypt Khnum makes every child in its mother's womb, and the birth goddesses attend the making of humans in Enki and Ninmah.

On the side of society, the stories explain why people work and why they are unequal. The basket and the yoke in Sumer and Babylon are work passed from the gods to humans, and Kingu, from whose blood humans are made, is a qinn, a slave, in his page's reading. Ninmah makes defective bodies and Enki finds work for them, so the disabled man becomes a servant of the king and every body is given a livelihood. Nüwa makes the rich by hand and the poor with the cord, India's orders are the limbs of Puruṣa's body, and Hesiod's races decline from gold to the iron race that never rests from toil. The story of the material a human was made from is also the story of his place among people.