Two Sons, One Founder, No Will: The Enlil–Enki Dispute As A Family Firm

LONDON, United Kingdom — In the thirty-fourth year of a reign, the same instruction went out twice, under two different names, forty-one days apart.

Forty days after the second one, it was countermanded. The reversal was entered as a cost: eleven talents of copper, written off, dated, itemised, on the reverse of a tablet that has sat in a Philadelphia store since 1931.

That is not a myth. It is a line in an account, and I read accounts for a living.

The founder who signs nothing

Start with the structure, because the structure is the ordinary part.

An sits at the top of every theology in the corpus and does not appear on a single instruction in this archive. Named everywhere, issues nothing. In the world I usually write about, that is the founder who has retired to the villa and kept the shares.

Below him, two heirs with incompatible claims. Sitchin's reading of the succession — and on this his reading is simply the administrative one — puts the elder son on one side and the legal heir on the other, because the succession rule turns on the mother's rank rather than on birth order. Seniority goes one way. Ownership goes the other.

Split legal ownership from operational control between two people, leave no tie-breaker, and you have built the standard second-generation controlling-family structure — the one every succession textbook prints under a heading about what not to do.

The two functions

Enlil holds land, allocation and enforcement. The instructions issued over his name concern who receives what, and what follows when they do not deliver.

Enki holds water, craft, and the standard to which things are made. The instructions over his name concern the making and moving of things.

A chief executive with the land bank, and a production director with the plant. Those two people fight in every company I have ever covered, and they fight about one thing: whether the plant runs to the order book, or the order book runs to the plant.

How you can tell them apart at all

None of this would be visible without a piece of dry philology.

Professor Ekundayo Adeleke-Sørvaag's 1998 concordance, PX-1908, is best known in this newspaper as the book that demolished one of our own stories. Its fourth section does something else. It sorts Ur III closing formulae by the authority under which the instruction was issued — and the two names take different closings, consistently, and never swap.

That is a signature block. It is the reason the duplication can be seen at all.

The year it went out twice

Two tablets, accessioned together in 1931 and shelved together for ninety-five years. PX-1901 is grain. PX-1903 is copper. The catalogue dates them five years apart; their own year-names put them in the same year, which Adeleke-Sørvaag confirmed from her notes in an afternoon.

The grain schedule carries the order for the third delivery under one authority. The copper schedule carries the same order, under the other, forty-one days later.

And on the reverse of the copper schedule — the face nobody had asked to see since 1974 — is the countermand and its price.

We have built fourteen stories on four lines of the obverse of that tablet. Nobody in this building had turned it over.

What the two advisers said

I sent the attributions out stripped: names replaced by A and B, dates converted to day counts, no period, no place. Two readers, separately, no contact.

Both came back with the same structural finding, and both reached for the same phrase. A two-person body with divided competences, overlapping issuing authority, and no third vote. Achebe-Larsson used the words casting vote in her first paragraph. Nakamura-Oduya used them in his second.

He has advised on controlling-family transitions for twenty-six years and told me he has never seen a two-heir split survive a second disagreement without somebody outside the family holding a tie-break.

Where my metaphor breaks, and it does

A temple household is not a firm and I want to be plain about it rather than have Professor Babatunde-Vaile be plain about it for me, which she is, below, at length.

There are no shareholders. Nobody can sell an interest and nobody can leave. There is no return on capital, because the purpose of the institution is the upkeep of a god's house forever. And there are no minutes: I am calling a thing a board on the strength of who issued what.

I also asked two people who detect governance failure for a living, and reported that they detected governance failure. Her sentence about the veterinarian is the best line anybody gave me this month.

What survives all of that

Two things, and neither of them is a metaphor.

The first is that there were two of them — two authorities, not one office wearing two names. Professor Babatunde-Vaile, who thinks the rest of this column is a category error, puts it in her second paragraph and calls it settled: Enki and Enlil are not two names for one office, they take different closing formulae, they attach to different classes of instruction, and in the administrative record they do not substitute for one another. That is the part of Zecharia Sitchin's reading people argue about, conceded without prompting by the scholar who came here to argue with me.

The second is the accounting.

Somebody was required to write down what the disagreement cost. Not to narrate it, not to justify it — to put a quantity of copper against a reversal, dated, in the same column as everything else that month.

Institutions do not price their own deadlock unless the deadlock is real and recurring enough to need a line for it.

Two authorities. One archive. One year. Eleven talents, and a clerk keeping score.