Nammu

Description

Primordial Mother of the Deep who “gave birth to Heaven and Earth,” according to Sumerian scripture. Nammu or Namma created humans from the clay, long before the writing of Genesis / Bereshit. She created without a male partner.

In the Sumerian An-Anum, tablet I line 28, Namma is titled “Mother who gave birth to the heavens and the earth.” Her name is written with the engur glyph for “subterranean waters.”  The poem of Enki and Ninmah calls her the “original mother who gave birth to the gods of the universe.”

The Babylonian counterpart of Nammu is Tiamat. Her name comes from tâmtu, “sea,” in the vocative case (a grammatical inflection used in directly addresses a person or deity, as in “O  Sea!”). The Babylonian Enūma Eliš calls Tiamat the “Mother of All the Gods (Tablet I, line 4), but her son Marduk killed and dismembered her to create the above and below.” Tiamat appears earlier in an Old Akkadian incantation.

Here I have painted Nammu as a sea-serpent of the Waters, the Source pouring out the essence of life.