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Updated: June 18, 2025
According to our Sumerian text he reigned in Erech for a hundred years. Another attractive Babylonian legend is that of Etana, the prototype of Icarus and hero of the earliest dream of human flight. Clinging to the pinions of his friend the Eagle he beheld the world and its encircling stream recede beneath him; and he flew through the gate of heaven, only to fall headlong back to earth.
The most famous of the later patesis, or viceroys, of Shirpurla, the Sumerian city in Southern Babylonia now marked by the mounds of Telloh. Photograph by Messrs. Mansell & Co. Ur, Isin, and,Larsam succeeded one another in the position of leading city in Babylonia, holding Mppur, Eridu, Erech, Shirpurla, and the other chief cities in a condition of semi-dependence upon themselves.
In the Second Column of the text the lines are also fortunately preserved which record the passing of the first hegemony of Kish to the "Kingdom of Eanna", the latter taking its name from the famous temple of Anu and Ishtar in the old city of Erech. The text continues: The kingdom of Kish passed to Eanna.
But in the heyday of their new-driven corner stakes, what wars were waged for the power to draw people into them; and especially, how the county-seat fights raged like prairie fires set out by those Nimrods who sought to make up in the founding of cities for what they lacked as hunters, in comparison with the establisher of Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh in the land of Shinar.
And though we possess no detailed account of Anu's creative work, the persistent ascription to him of the creation of heaven, and his familiar title, "the Father of the Gods", suggest that he once possessed a corresponding body of myth in Eanna, his temple at Erech.
She approaches closest to Nanâ, the Ishtar of Erech; but just as we found the Babylonian Ishtar appearing under various names and forms, so there are no less than three Ishtars in Assyria, distinguished in the texts as Ishtar of Nineveh, Ishtar of Arbela, and Ishtar who presides over the temple known as Kidmuru and who for that reason is generally called 'the queen of Kidmuru. The seat of the latter was in Nineveh, as was of course also the seat of Ishtar of Nineveh.
Supposing that the two hundred miles of alluvial country, which separates them from the head of the Persian Gulf at present, have been deposited at the very high rate of four miles in a century, it will follow that 4000 years ago, or about the year 2100 B.C., the city of Erech still lay forty miles inland. Indeed, the city might have been built a thousand years earlier.
In later forms of the legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being, half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men in arts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he was an author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressed to him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god of Erech on the lower Euphrates.
In each of these districts we have a sort of tetrarchy, or special pre-eminence of four cities, such as appears to be indicated by the words "The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar."
Wherefore, when at any time there arose another that showed cruelty to the ways of God, he was presently compared to Nimrod, that "hunted before the Lord." Ver. 10. "And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar."
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