Enlil, Sumer's chief god, reportedly sent a flood because humans were too noisy
For centuries Enlil ruled the Mesopotamian gods from his temple at Nippur, a city that never built a royal palace because the god himself was its king. He pried heaven apart from earth to make room for people, yet in one Babylonian myth he tried to drown humanity for keeping him awake.
Enlil was linked with wind, air, earth and storms. The first half of his name, EN, means lord; the second, LÍL, is disputed, read variously as wind, as a spirit felt in stirring air, or possibly as a borrowing from a Semitic language. Piotr Steinkeller has suggested Enlil may simply have been a universal god with no single domain, and some scholars connect him with a word from Ebla or place his origins in eastern Mesopotamia, pointing to his title the Great Mountain.
His home was the Ekur, the Mountain House, at Nippur, believed to have been built by Enlil and described as the mooring-rope binding heaven and earth. Priests fed his cult statue a daily ritual feast, later shared among themselves, and changed its clothes. Kings across Sumer travelled to Nippur to have their rule legitimised and endowed the temple with land and treasures; even after Marduk displaced him, Babylonian monarchs still made the journey. A hymn claims Enlil was so radiant that even other gods could not look at him. He was pictured through a horned cap of up to seven pairs of ox-horns, the number fifty was sacred to him, and he governed the stars of the northern sky, with Boötes as his constellation.
The myths paint a complicated character. In one creation account, An and Ki, sky and earth, produce Enlil, who separates them and takes the earth as his domain. In the Sumerian flood story he grants the survivor Ziusudra immortality, but in the Babylonian Atra-Hasis he causes the flood himself. The 152-line poem Enlil and Ninlil has him seducing the goddess repeatedly in disguise, fathering the moon-god Nanna and underworld deities including Nergal. He was also credited with inventing the mattock and protecting farming.
Enlil rose to the top in the 24th century BC as An's importance faded, held on through the Amorite period and weakened after Hammurabi conquered Sumer. A revival came under the Kassites, but after the Elamites sacked Nippur in 1230 BC his cult declined, and about a century later Marduk took his place as head of the pantheon.
Source: Enlil
