Summary
The apkallū are the Seven Sages of Babylonian and Assyrian tradition, sent by Ea, that is Enki, out of the waters of the Apsu before the Flood to teach people writing, crafts and the building of cities. Akkadian literature calls them "the Seven Sages" and describes them as pure fish, and later scribes made them the fathers of their learning. The Babylonian and Sumerian essays make Adapa the first of them.
The fullest description that survives is in Greek, by a Babylonian priest named Berossus who wrote a history of Babylon in the third century BCE; his extracts were kept by Alexander Polyhistor and then by Eusebius and Syncellus. In the beginning, he says, many peoples lived in Babylon without rule or order, like beasts. In the first year there came up out of the Erythraean sea, the Gulf, a creature endowed with reason called Oannes. His whole body was that of a fish; under the fish's head was another head, and below were feet like a man's joined to the fish's tail; his voice and language were human, and a likeness of him was still kept. By day he spoke with people and took no food; he taught them letters, sciences and every art, how to build houses, found temples, make laws and the principles of geometry, how to tell seeds apart and gather fruits; he taught them everything that softens manners, so that nothing has been added since. At sunset he plunged back into the sea and spent the night in the deep. After him other creatures like him, half fish and half man, came up in the reigns of the kings before the Flood, which came in the reign of the tenth.
Akkadian poetry knows them from the other side, after the Flood. In Erra and Išum Marduk tells Erra: once, in anger, I rose from my throne and sent the Flood; "those craftsmen I brought down to the Apsû, and I have not decreed their return". Then he asks: where is the mēsu-tree, the flesh of the gods, whose roots reach through the sea to the depths of the netherworld and whose top touches Anu's heaven? Where is Ninildu, the master carpenter? Where is Kusibanda, maker of the images of gods and men? Where is Ninagal, who works copper as if it were leather? "Where are the seven sages of the Apsû, pure carps, who like Ea their lord are perfect in their august wisdom, the purifiers of my body?" Erra and Išum, Tablet I, 147–162.
The idea their stories turn on is that civilisation came out of the water and went back into it. The sages came up from the sea to teach, and laid the foundations of Uruk in kiln-fired brick, as Gilgamesh says at the beginning and end of his epic; when the Flood came they were brought down to the Apsu and did not return, and what they taught stayed with people. That is why scribes name them whenever they want to say their learning is old: Ashurbanipal says he learned "the craft of the sage Adapa", and on a bronze plaque in the Louvre the exorcists around a sick man's bed are shown as fish-men, the form Berossus gives the sages.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Akkadian apkallu is taken from Sumerian abgal; the final -u is the Akkadian case ending and the l is doubled as Akkadian doubles it. That leaves ab-gal. Both essays read it ab, father, and jall, great: the Sumerian essay says "the great fathers", and the Babylonian essay reads the second part as kull, "father of all", the all-embracing sage. Lane gives abb as a dialectal form of ab, father, and jalla as being great in rank; Sumerian g answers Arabic j as in the name of Nergal. The story bears the sense out: first teachers to whom every craft goes back, perfect in wisdom "like Ea their lord".
Linguistic Root
Ab and jall
| Form | Use |
|---|---|
| ABGAL | The Sumerian writing, also written with the two signs NUN.ME |
| apkallu | Akkadian, "wise man, expert", an epithet of some gods and of Adapa |
| sebet apkallū | "The Seven Sages", as in Erra and Išum and Gilgameš |
| purādū | "Carps", Erra and Išum I 162, the sages as pure fish |
| Ὠάννης, Ōannēs | In Berossus, the first to come up from the sea |
First we separate what is not part of the stem. The -u of apkallu is an Akkadian case ending, dropped in the plural construct and before a genitive, and b and g became p and k because Akkadian unvoices them side by side. The Sumerian base is abgal. Sumerian gal means "great" beyond dispute, and the reading jall works as it does in the name of Nergal: Sumerian g answers Arabic j, l is l, and the Arabic root is doubled. Lane: jalla, he was great in estimation and rank; jalāl, supreme greatness, said of God alone. Ab the essays read as father, and Lane gives abb as a dialectal form of ab. But the writing does not show how the word divides: it is written with the single sign ABGAL and with the two signs NUN.ME, so the division into ab and jall is the essays' proposal, and nothing in the writing confirms or rules it out.
Other readings in the two essays
After ab + jall, the Sumerian essay lists abb + qāla, the source of speech and wisdom (middling), abjad, the givers of writing (interpretive), and abḥar, the people of the sea (weak). The last meets the story from one side, since in Berossus and in Erra and Išum the sages really do come from the sea, but the ḥ is not in the name. The second meets Berossus's account of Oannes speaking, but needs q where the name has g. The Babylonian essay makes the second part kull, close in sound to jall, and gives it the sense of completeness: a sage who knows everything, which is what Berossus says when he writes that Oannes taught every art and nothing was added after him. The two readings meet: jall in sound and rank, kull in the breadth of learning.
Key Mythic Narratives
Those who came up from the sea after Oannes
Apollodorus, reporting Berossus, says that Oannes appeared in the reign of the fourth king, Ammenon, and was called the Annedotus; in the reign of the sixth king, Daonus the shepherd, four more appeared with the same form, half fish and half man, and in the reign of the seventh one named Odacon. All of them, he says, set out in detail what Oannes had told. The transmitters differ in number and order: Abydenus puts the second Annedotus in the reign of the third king and names four of them. Berossus also says Oannes wrote on the origin of mankind, their ways of life and civil order, and then gives his account of creation: darkness and an abyss of water full of monstrous beings, ruled by a woman named Omoroca, until Belus cut her in two and made half of her earth and half sky. Cory, pp. 51–59; see Tiamat.
The wall of Uruk
Gilgamesh opens and closes his epic with the same words: go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, survey the foundation, inspect the brickwork: is it not kiln-fired brick, did not the Seven Sages lay its foundations? Then he measures the city: one šār city, one šār date grove, one šār clay pits, half a šār the temple of Ishtar. The hero who sought immortality and did not find it comes back to what the sages built, and the wall is what remains. Gilgameš, Tablet I, 18–23, Tablet XI, 323–328; see Urshanabi.
The lists of kings and sages
A Seleucid-period tablet from Uruk lists beside each king before the Flood a sage, the first of them U-Anna, the name Berossus wrote in Greek as Oannes; after the Flood it goes on to the scholars who served the kings, joining the scribes' learning of its own day to the first sages.
Symbolic Reading
The Babylonian essay says the apkallū correspond to the prophets of the Semitic tradition and to Prometheus, teacher of mankind, and the Sumerian essay says their half-fish form ties them to Enki, god of wisdom and water. The texts support both pictures: they are messengers who bring knowledge from a god, and in Erra and Išum they purify Marduk's body as exorcists restore purity. They differ from Prometheus in that they stole nothing; their lord sent them, and they were not punished for what they taught, but brought down to the Apsu when Marduk's anger fell on the whole earth.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
The apkallū are Mesopotamia's clearest picture of culture heroes who taught people their crafts, and they are tied to the Flood from two sides: they came before it, and it took them away.
In Egypt writing and reckoning are credited to Thoth, scribe of the gods and teacher of scribes, as learning in Babylon is credited to the sages Ea sent. In China the invention of writing is credited to Cangjie, who looked at the tracks of birds and beasts and made the characters. In all three, writing is the gift of a first teacher; only in Babylon does the teacher come out of the water.
The Hindu essay sets the seven sages, the ṛṣis, beside the apkallū, reading ṛṣi as Arabic raʾīs, leader, and rāʾī, seer. In the Indian flood story the fish Matsya tells Manu to board the ship with the seven sages and the seeds, and draws the ship to the mountain. In India a fish saves the sages from the Flood; in Babylon sages in the form of fish are taken down into the water by it. See Manu.