Abzu

One of them was fresh, the sweet water, the kind that comes up cold out of the ground and that you can drink.

His name was Apsu.

The other was salt.

The wide, bitter water, the sea.

Every person who has ever been in a house with young people in it knows this exact feeling, and the poem was written for people in such houses, and I do not think that is an accident, and I do not think it is a joke either.

It is the reason for everything that happens afterward, and the poem gives it to you first before it gives anybody a side to be on.

Apsu felt it too, the fresh water, the father, and Apsu could not silence them.

He came to Tiamat, and he said, "Their ways have become painful to me.

He was a central power in the divine order, associated with freshwater, wisdom, ritual knowledge, craftsmanship, fertility, cleverness, and the hidden forces that made civilization possible.

His domain was the Abzu.

The Abzu was the vast underground freshwater deep believed to lie beneath the earth.

To modern eyes, this can sound strange, but think about the world southern Mesopotamians lived in.

Their land was built between rivers.

He was connected to the source beneath the surface, the hidden reservoir, the life-giving force that existed before canals, before cities, before kings claimed authority over the land.

and Eridu was where that power touched the human world.

Ancient hymns describe Enki's temple at Eridu as the E-Engura, often understood as the House of the Abzu.

And

plus the kingdom of Enki, the Abzu, has been found due to satellite technology.

We know that there was an Anunnaki city bigger than Los Angeles and San Francisco put together down at South Africa and today's Mozambique.

I mean, you can see all the outlines of it that go back to over 200,000 years ago.

He didn't like being on earth.

And the gods of the Abzu had gone below.

That's Africa, South Africa, marshland.

They had built an underground base there.

If you read deeper into this, it's just a small part of the text.

But to tell you what the Abzu is, that's where the gods had to dig it out.

And they dug out canals to clear channels, the lifelines of the land.

The gods dug out the Tigris River.

If the throne was an office that could pass from ruler to ruler, then where did that office exist before any human ruler received it at all? According to the Sumerian religious imagination, it existed with the gods.

More specifically, many of the me were kept in the custody of Enki, the god of wisdom, fresh water, craft, cunning, and the deep subterranean waters the Sumerians called the Abzu.

Enki was not just another god in a crowded pantheon.

He was the keeper of hidden knowledge, the planner, the problem-solver, the divine figure who understood the mechanisms beneath the surface of the world.