The Seven Sages

Kings Without Advisers

The Sumerian King List names eight rulers before the flood and says nothing about anyone standing beside them. There are no priests, no scribes, no counsellors. Another strand of Mesopotamian tradition remembers it differently. In that tradition, seven sages stood beside the early kings. They were associated with Enki, whom the Babylonians called Ea, and with the transmission of divine knowledge and the arts of civilization. They are called the apkallu (in Sumerian, abgal).

Two Lists

There is no single list of the seven. Two ancient texts give their names, and they were written centuries apart.

The older is the Bit Meseri list, which is Neo-Assyrian in date. It names seven sages in order: Uanna, Uannedugga, Enmedugga, Enmegalamma, Enmebulugga, Anenlilda and Utuabzu. It describes them in short phrases. Uanna completed the plans of heaven and earth. Enmedugga decreed good fate. Anenlilda was a purification priest from Eridu. Utuabzu ascended to heaven. The text takes its name from the bit meseri, a protective rite in which magical figurines were set around a house.

The later list is the Uruk List of Kings and Sages. It is a clay tablet, IM 65066 (excavation number W 20030,7), found in Anu’s Bit Resh temple at Uruk during the 1959–60 German season and published by Jan van Dijk in 1962. It is dated to the 147th year of King Antiochus, about 165 BC. It pairs each of seven pre-flood kings with a sage:

The tablet does not stop at the flood. Under Enmerkar, it says, the sage was Nungalpirigal, “whom Ishtar brought down from heaven to Eana.” It then runs on through a line of named scholars into the historical period, ending with Aba-Enlil-dari, whom the Arameans called Ahiqar, under King Esarhaddon.

By the Numbers

• Sages in each list: 7
• King-and-sage pairs before the flood (Uruk list): 7
• Kings before the flood (ETCSL text): 8
• Date of the Uruk tablet: about 165 BC
• Sages said to have ascended to heaven: 1 — Utuabzu, the seventh

Not the Same Kings

The seven kings on the Uruk tablet are not the eight kings of the Sumerian King List as the ETCSL gives them. That text runs: Alulim and Alalgar at Eridu; En-men-lu-ana, En-men-gal-ana and Dumuzid at Bad-tibira; En-sipad-zid-ana at Larak; En-men-dur-ana at Sippar; Ubara-Tutu at Shuruppak.

The Uruk list shares several of these. Ameluana and Amegalana look like variant spellings of En-men-lu-ana and En-men-gal-ana, and Enmeduranki is the En-men-dur-ana of Sippar. But it includes a king, Enmeusumgalana, who is not in the ETCSL text. And on its pairing it has no place for En-sipad-zid-ana or Ubara-Tutu. These are two different traditions of the same early past, and the sage list is the later of the two. This site’s city pages follow the ETCSL text.

Adapa

The first sage, Uanna, is identified with Adapa, and Adapa has a story of his own. In the myth, Ea gave Adapa wisdom but not eternal life. Adapa lived in Eridu, where he fished and steered boats for the city. One day a south wind overturned his boat, and he broke the wind’s wing, so that it did not blow for seven days. The sky god Anu summoned him to heaven to explain.

Ea advised him to refuse the food and drink he would be offered there, calling them the food and drink of death. Anu offered him the food and water of life. Adapa, trusting Ea, refused. In the story, that is why humanity is mortal.

In the Uruk list Adapa serves the first king, Alulim of Eridu. The sage and the first city are tied together from the start.

Oannes

The Babylonian priest Berossus wrote a history of Babylonia for King Antiochus I in the early third century BC. It survives only in quotations: Alexander Polyhistor summarized it, and Josephus and Eusebius used that summary. In it a creature named Oannes comes up out of the Persian Gulf by day. He has the body of a fish, with a man’s head and a man’s feet. He teaches people writing, the arts and the sciences. Britannica says he was probably the emissary of Ea.

The name Oannes is commonly taken to be a Greek form of Uanna, the first sage on the cuneiform lists. If so, Berossus gives us the same idea, told for a Greek-reading audience: knowledge arrived from the water, linked to the god of Eridu.

The Seventh Pair

The seventh king on the Uruk list is Enmeduranki, the king of Sippar, and his sage is Utuabzu. The older Bit Meseri list says of Utuabzu that he ascended to heaven.

That detail connects two other pages on this site. Sippar was the city of the sun god, and its king is paired with the one sage said to go up. And the legend of Etana, the king who ascended, appears later in the tradition. The Bit Meseri list has a sage go up before him. The sources I checked say nothing more about how or why Utuabzu ascended.

What the Sages Ask

Every source on the sages is late. The Bit Meseri list is Neo-Assyrian. The Uruk tablet is from the Hellenistic period, and so is Berossus. Alan Lenzi reads the Uruk list as a document of scribal self-interest: Hellenistic scholars giving themselves a genealogy that runs back to Ea, to strengthen their claim to authority. That is a fair reading and it should be kept in view.

It still leaves a question. Why would the scholars of a late age give the earliest kings advisers sent from the water, and why was the first of them supposed to have been offered immortality? The King List itself says only that kingship came down from heaven. These other traditions say that someone also came to teach it.

Who were the seven — and what did the kings need to be taught?