Anunnaki and Igigi

Summary

The Anunnaki and the Igigi are two groups of gods in Mesopotamian myth. The Anunnaki, Sumerian Anunna, are the great gods who decree the fates; in the Babylonian period the name came to mean the gods of the netherworld. Igigi is a Semitic name for another group, who in later texts are the gods of heaven as against the Anunnaki. The texts agree neither on their number nor on who belongs to each group.

Their great story opens the epic of Atrahasis: "When gods were man, they did forced labour, they bore drudgery." The seven great Anunnaki made the Igigi bear the work; Anu was their father and king, Enlil their counsellor and warrior, Ninurta their prefect. They cast lots: Anu went up to heaven, Enlil took the earth, and Enki was given the bolt of the sea. The Igigi dug the rivers, first the Tigris and then the Euphrates, opened springs and heaped up the mountains, forty years of labour night and day. They sat complaining in the ditch: let us face our prefect so that he takes our heavy burden off us; let us remove Enlil from his dwelling. They set fire to their tools, put fire to their spades, and went together to Enlil's gate, surrounding his house at midnight while he did not know. His vizier Nusku woke him; Enlil was afraid and called Anu and Enki. They sent Nusku to ask which god had started the fighting, and the Igigi answered: "Every one of us gods has declared war. Excessive drudgery has killed us, our forced labour was heavy, our misery too much." Enlil wept. Ea said: why do we blame them? Their labour was heavy. Let the mother goddess create a human being to bear the yoke, the yoke of Enlil; let man assume the drudgery of god. Mami said: this is Enki's task, let him give me the clay. Enki said: on the first, seventh and fifteenth days of the month I will set up a purification, a bath; let one god be slaughtered and the gods be purified in it, and let Nintu mix clay with his flesh and blood, so that from the god's flesh a spirit remains. In their assembly they slaughtered Aw-ila, "who had the inspiration", Nintu mixed the clay with his flesh and blood, then he summoned the Anunna, and the Igigi spat upon the clay. Mami said to the great gods: I have done away with your heavy forced labour, I have imposed your drudgery on man. They ran to her and kissed her feet.

The idea the story turns on is that the world has those who rule and those who work, and that humans were made to take the worker's place. The Igigi were the great gods' labourers, and their revolt did not change who ruled; it moved the load from their backs to man's. The god slaughtered to make humans from his flesh and blood is the one "who had the inspiration", so something of his mind and spirit stayed in man. Enūma eliš then retold the story for Marduk: he made humankind from the blood of Kingu so that they "shall bear the gods' toil and the gods shall rest", divided the Anunnaki into three hundred in heaven and three hundred in the netherworld, and the Anunnaki built him Babylon in thanks.

We read the two names in the Arabic tongue like this. Igigi is written i-gi-gu and i-gi-gi; it is a Semitic word beyond dispute, and Oracc notes that von Soden suggested it was Amorite, and later that it might be of Arabic origin. Its letters are a doubled g after a throat sound, which are the letters of ajja, the Babylonian essay's reading, and of ʿajja, the Sumerian essay's. Lane: ajjat al-nār, the fire blazed and made a sound by its blazing; ʿajja, he cried out and raised his voice; ʿajīj, the crying out and clamour of a people. Both readings are in the story: the Igigi burned their tools, and the labour gang cried out in revolt. The Anunnaki the essays read as Anu + ki, the children of heaven on earth, or Anu + naqī, the chosen ones of Anu. The Sumerian spelling a-nun-na means "those of princely seed", so Anu in both readings meets the text in meaning, since Anu is "their father" at the start of Atrahasis, but the spelling divides the letters a-nun, not an-un, unlike the essays' division.

Linguistic Root

Igigi: ajja and ʿajja

Take off the final -u and -i, the Akkadian case endings for singular and plural, and igig remains: a throat sound followed by a doubled g. Akkadian g is Arabic j regularly. As for the first letter, Akkadian writing does not tell glottal stop from ʿayn, since ʿayn was lost, so the root may be ʾ-j-j or ʿ-j-j. In Lane the two are close: ajjat al-nār, the fire blazed or made a sound by its blazing; ajja al-ẓalīm, the ostrich ran with a rustling like that of fire; ʿajja, he cried out and raised his voice; ʿajjat al-rīḥ, the wind raised the dust; ʿajīj, the crying out and clamour of a people. In the story the Igigi burn their spades and tools and then cry war around Enlil's house, and at the end Mami tells the gods that they have bestowed clamour upon humankind. Fire and outcry are what the Igigi do in the text, and the two readings together explain the name. Only the first letter is undecided.

Anunnaki: "those of princely seed"

The Sumerian name divides like this: a, seed or offspring; nun, prince; -na, the genitive; then -ke₄, the agent marker, and -ne, the plural, grammatical endings that entered the Akkadian name Anunnakū. The base is "those of princely seed", as Falkenstein and Edzard judge. The essays divide it otherwise: the Sumerian essay as Anu + na + ki, the children of heaven on earth, and the Babylonian essay as Anu + nakī from nuqqī, the chosen of Anu, which it grades "likely on the Sumerian side". The Anu reading takes its a and n from two different syllables, and the ki reading takes the agent marker as the word for earth. Yet both readings meet the texts at two points: Anu is "their father" at the start of Atrahasis, and Oracc notes that An is sometimes called father of the Anunna; and Akkadian scribes themselves wrote the name with the sign KI, at a time when the Anunnaki had become the gods of the netherworld, the gods under the earth. So the readings hold for the name as the Babylonians understood it, while the division of the first Sumerian word stays open. Lane: naqqāhu, he cleansed it and picked out its best, removing what was bad; nuqāya, the choice part of a thing, which comes near "princely seed" in sense. The Babylonian essay also lists anʿama, those favoured, as interpretive, and ʿanaq, height, as weak.

Key Mythic Narratives

The seven judges below

When Inanna went down to the netherworld and was stripped of her garments at the gates, she made her sister Ereshkigal rise from her throne and sat in her place; the Anunna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her: they looked at her with the look of death, spoke to her with the speech of anger, shouted at her with the shout of heavy guilt, and she was turned into a corpse and hung on a hook. In this Sumerian text the Anunna are already judges below, before that became the meaning of their name in the Babylonian period. Gilgamesh is called "judge of the Anunnaki" in his epic. Inana's Descent to the Netherworld, 164–172, Gilgameš, Tablet VIII, 210; see Judgment of the Dead.

Torches in the Flood

In Tablet XI of Gilgameš, when the Flood comes, the Anunnaki bear torches aloft and set the land aglow; then the gods take fright at the Flood, go up to the heaven of Anu and curl up like dogs, Bēlet-ilī screams like a woman in childbirth, and the Anunnaki weep with her. Gilgameš, Tablet XI, 100–126; see Flood Myth.

The division in Enūma eliš

After making humankind from Kingu's blood, Marduk divided the gods into upper and lower: three hundred in heaven and as many for the ways of the netherworld, six hundred in all. The Anunnaki said: now that you have freed us from toil, how may we repay you? We will build you a shrine to rest in. They set to with hoes and made its bricks for a full year, and in the second year raised the head of Esagila. Then the three hundred Igigi of heaven and the six hundred of the Apsu convened. In Erra and Išum the Igigi and the Anunnaki are clearly two groups.

Symbolic Reading

The Babylonian reread essay calls the Igigi revolt "the first labour strike in history": hard labour in Sumer, digging canals and building ziggurats, fell on one class of people, and the revolt is theirs. It reads the making of humans for work as the corvée, the conscription of farmers to labour for the elite, and the noise of people that disturbed Enlil as a population explosion and the pressure it put on water and crops. The text supplies the material for this reading: its work bears the names of real Mesopotamian work, digging rivers and canals and heaping earth, and the labour gang shouts in the ditch.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Babylonian essay sets the Anunnaki beside the Greek Olympians, the Norse Aesir and the Indian devas, and the Sumerian essay sets the Igigi revolt beside the war of the Titans and the Olympians. The texts show the difference plainly: in the Theogony Zeus and his siblings fight Kronos and the Titans for the kingship, defeat them and shut them in Tartarus; in Atrahasis the Igigi do not ask for the kingship but for rest, and they are not imprisoned; humans are made to relieve them. The Greek structural essay sets the first Anunnaki beside Ouranos and Gaia in the first generation. See Theogony and Enuma Elish.

The Norse also have two groups, the Aesir and the Vanir, who fought "the first war in the world" and then made peace by exchanging hostages and became one. In India and Iran two groups exchange rank: the devas are gods in India and the asuras their enemies, while in Iran the ahura is the highest god and the daevas are demons. In each of these stories the gods are split in two, and what happens between them differs: war and imprisonment among the Greeks, peace among the Norse, an exchange of names between India and Iran, and the transfer of labour to man in Mesopotamia.

The transfer of labour to man in Atrahasis is the oldest complete account of the creation of humans from clay and a slain god's blood, and the assembly in which the Anunnaki decide belongs with the divine council.