Myth, Ritual, and Order in "Enki and the World Order"

"Enki and the World Order" (henceforth EWO) is a long and relatively well-preserved Sumerian mythological composition (ca. 472 lines).' It divides naturally into four major sections. First, there is an opening third-person praise to Enki (lines 1-60). Second, Enki praises himself twice in the first person (lines 61-139): (a) in his first self-praise Enki recounts how Enlil commissioned him and gave him the gift of the me's and nam-t a r, the various cultural components that made up the core of Sumerian life and culture, and the power to determine destinies, respectively (lines 61-85), and (b) in the second self-praise Enki proposes to take a journey through Sumer on his barge, in order to fulfill his commission to establish proper order and prosperity in Sumer (lines 86-139). Third, the long central section of the composition recounts Enki's journey through the land, decreeing the destiny of the Sumerian world (lines 140-386). In the first part of this section Enki begins with Sumer as a whole, and especially Ur, and moves from there to the surrounding regions of Magan, Melubba, and Dilmun (lines 140-249). In the second part of the journey he comes back to the Sumerian homeland itself, where in a twelve-cycle series he assigns specific deities to take charge of the functions of various regions and elements of the Sumerian world order (lines 250-386). Fourth, and finally, Inanna complains to Enki that he had not assigned her any special functional powers in his decreeing of destinies, and Enki responds to her complaint (lines 387-471). In a previous article I treated in some detail the twelvefold cycle of the second part of Enki's journey (lines 250-386), in which Enki establishes the flow and fecundity of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the canals (cycles 1-4), the tools, principles, and crops of the farmer (cycles 5-6), the tools and practices of brick making and construction (cycles 7-8), the plains and pastures with their herds and flocks (cycles 9-10), and finally the various city states and their industries (cycles 11-12).2 I proposed there that, although EWO is a complex