Compendium of the Emerald Tablets — The myth of Etana is a Mesopotamian story, written in Akkadian, about Etana, a legendary shepherd-king of Kish who has no heir and rides to heaven on the back of an eagle to find the "plant of birth". Woven into it is a fable of an eagle and a serpent who swear an oath before the sun god Shamash, break it, and suffer for it. It is one of the oldest surviving stories of a human being flying into the sky.
The story matters because it sits where several debates meet. The Sumerian King List names Etana as a king of Kish "who ascended to heaven", so the myth is tied to the oldest Mesopotamian account of kingship. Its descriptions of the earth shrinking beneath a rising traveller are among the most quoted passages in ancient-astronaut literature. And its cylinder-seal images are older than any surviving copy of the written text. This article sets out what the tablets say, what scholars make of them, and how Billy Carson reads Etana's ascent. For the wider background, start at the Anunnaki topic hub.
Who was Etana?
Etana is a king of the First Dynasty of Kish as recorded in the Sumerian King List, the scribal list of cities and rulers that presents kingship as a single office passed from city to city. After the flood, the list says, kingship descended from heaven to Kish, and among the early kings of that dynasty it names "Etana, the shepherd, who ascended to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries". In the best-known copies he rules for 1,500 years; one manuscript gives 635. His son Balih follows him with a reign of 400 years (410 in some copies).
Scholars treat these early kings and their reign lengths as legendary rather than historical. The post-flood section of the list only begins to agree with contemporary inscriptions a few names after Etana, with Enmebaragesi of Kish, and the long reigns shorten steadily as the list approaches its own time. Our guide to the Sumerian King List explains how Assyriologists read the document. Etana's entry is unusual because its phrase "who ascended to heaven" points to a story told on other tablets.
What texts tell the story of Etana?
The story survives in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Babylonia and Assyria, not in Sumerian. Three main versions are known, and none is complete.
The oldest is an Old Babylonian version from the early second millennium BCE, known from fragments found at Susa in Iran and at Tell Harmal near Baghdad. A short Middle Assyrian fragment comes from the city of Assur. The fullest text is the Standard version, preserved on Neo-Assyrian tablets of the 7th century BCE from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, the same library that preserved the Standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Fragments of the Etana epic were first recognised among the Nineveh tablets in the 1890s.
Every version is broken, with gaps of uncertain length, so any retelling is a reconstruction. The standard English translation is Stephanie Dalley's in Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford World's Classics). Benjamin R. Foster's translation in From Distant Days and Before the Muses is the other widely used version.
What happens in the myth of Etana?
The myth combines two stories, a fable about an eagle and a serpent and the tale of a king who needs an heir, and joins them when the king rescues the eagle.
Kingship comes to Kish
The epic opens with the gods founding the city of Kish. There is no king yet, and the goddess Ishtar searches for a shepherd to rule. Etana is chosen. He rules well, but he and his wife have no son, and without an heir the kingship the gods have just established cannot pass on.
The eagle and the serpent
In a parallel strand, an eagle nests at the top of a poplar tree near a shrine of the storm god Adad, and a serpent lives at its roots. The two swear an oath before Shamash, the sun god and god of justice (Utu in Sumerian), to share their hunting and to look after each other's young. For a time they keep it. Then the eagle decides to eat the serpent's children; one of its own fledglings warns against it, but the eagle does it anyway.
The serpent appeals to Shamash, who tells it to hide inside the carcass of a wild bull. When the eagle comes down to feed on the carcass, the serpent seizes it, cuts its wings, plucks its feathers and throws it into a pit to die of hunger and thirst. The eagle in turn prays to Shamash, who answers that he will send a man to help it.
Etana and the plant of birth
Etana, meanwhile, prays to Shamash for "the plant of birth", the one remedy that will give him a son. Shamash sends him to the pit. Etana finds the eagle, feeds it and nurses it back to health, and the two become friends. In return the eagle agrees to carry Etana up to the heaven of Anu, the sky god, where the plant is to be found.
The first flight and the fall
Etana holds on to the eagle and they rise. At each stage the eagle tells him to look down and describe the land. In the translations the land shrinks to hills, the sea becomes a stream and then no more than a gardener's ditch, and finally Etana cannot see the land or the sea at all. He panics and asks to go back. The eagle drops, and Etana falls, the eagle catching him on its wings just above the ground.
The second flight
There is then a gap in the tablets. When the text resumes, Etana is back in Kish, and he and his wife have dreams that encourage a second attempt. In Dalley's reconstruction the eagle and Etana rise again, pass the gates of the gods Sin, Shamash, Adad and Ishtar, and bow down together. The text breaks off as a door is pushed open.
How does the myth of Etana end?
No surviving tablet tells us whether Etana obtained the plant of birth. The story breaks off at the gates of heaven, and the fragment describing the fall may belong to an earlier attempt or to a variant. Because the Sumerian King List gives Etana a son and successor, Balih, most readers, Dalley included, conclude that the second flight succeeded and the plant was found. That is an inference from the king list rather than a line in the epic, and it should be read as one.
What the cylinder seals show
Etana's flight was a known image long before the surviving copies of the text were written. Cylinder seals of the Akkadian period (about 2334 to 2154 BCE), many centuries older than the Old Babylonian tablets, show a man riding upward on the back of a large eagle while, on the ground below, shepherds, dogs and flocks look up at the ascent. Scholars conventionally identify this scene as the flight of Etana.
The seals show that some form of the story was already in circulation under the dynasty of Sargon of Akkad, and that artists imagined the flight as the written text does: a man on a bird, watched from below.
What do scholars see in the Etana myth?
Scholars read the epic first as a story about kingship and succession. It opens with the gods founding Kish and choosing a king, and its plot turns on whether that king can produce an heir. Many Assyriologists read it as a legitimation myth, a story that explained the origin of kingship and grounded a dynasty's right to rule in the will of the gods.
The eagle-and-serpent fable is read on its own terms as a story about oaths and divine justice. The eagle swears before Shamash, breaks its word, and is punished through Shamash's own advice to the serpent, and it is restored only when Shamash sends Etana. Folklorists have also noticed how widely the flight motif travelled. The Etana story is commonly linked to tale type ATU 537, "the eagle as helper", in which a hero is carried on the wings of a grateful eagle, a type recorded in European folk tales of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Etana also belongs to a small group of Mesopotamian stories in which a mortal approaches the gods' heaven. The closest is the myth of Adapa, in which a sage of Eridu is summoned before Anu and turns down the bread and water of life.
Where the ancient-astronaut reading comes from
The ancient-astronaut reading treats Etana's flight as an eyewitness memory of air travel. Writers in that tradition point to the staged descriptions of the land shrinking, the sea becoming a narrow channel and the earth vanishing from view, and argue that a Bronze Age author could only have written this after seeing it from a great height. On that reading, the eagle is a disguised flying craft and Anu's heaven is a real place above the earth.
Mainstream scholars answer that ancient people did not need to fly to imagine the view. Anyone who had climbed a mountain or watched an eagle circle overhead could picture the land growing smaller, and the comparisons the text uses, hills, a stream, a gardener's ditch, are drawn from irrigated Mesopotamian farmland. They also note that the eagle in the epic is a living animal with a history: it swears an oath, eats the serpent's young, has its wings cut, nearly starves in a pit and is fed back to health. The Akkadian-period seals show it the same way, as a bird watched by shepherds and dogs.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson's reading of Etana comes through his work on the Sumerian King List. In his video "Sumerian Kings List Explained", summarised in our walkthrough of Billy Carson's Sumerian King List video, he reads the dynasty of Kish aloud and dwells on Etana, "the shepherd who ascended to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries", credited with 1,500 years. Carson stresses that Etana is said to have consolidated all the foreign lands into one kingdom.
His wider position is that the Sumerian King List is a genuine record of long-lived rulers connected to the Anunnaki, and that its long reigns reflect real longevity rather than literary invention. Read that way, Etana's ascent to heaven is more than a metaphor, and Carson places it alongside other ancient-astronaut readings of Mesopotamian texts. He returns to the king list and its reign lengths in the podcast episode Sumerian Kings List Explained: Ancient Rulers Who Reigned for 241,200 Years (Season 10, Episode 17).
These are Carson's interpretations. Mainstream Assyriology treats both the 1,500-year reign and the flight as legendary, and it reads the epic as a story about kingship and succession.
Watch, read and go deeper
For Billy Carson's broader case about the Anunnaki and the Sumerian texts, watch Anunnaki Ancient Secrets Revealed on 4BK TV. The Sumerian Kings List Explained episode of the 4biddenknowledge Podcast covers the king list in which Etana appears. To place Etana among the other Mesopotamian stories of mortals and the gods, read our guides to Adapa and Gilgamesh, and browse the rest of the series on the Anunnaki topic hub.
Frequently asked questions
What is the myth of Etana about?
The myth of Etana tells how Etana, a childless shepherd-king of Kish, rescues an eagle that has been thrown into a pit for breaking an oath to a serpent. In return the eagle carries him toward the heaven of Anu to find the plant of birth, so that he can have an heir. The surviving tablets break off before the ending.
Was Etana a real king?
The Sumerian King List names Etana as a king of the First Dynasty of Kish and gives him a reign of 1,500 years. Scholars treat the early kings of Kish, and certainly their reign lengths, as legendary rather than historical.
Is the Etana myth Sumerian or Akkadian?
The written story survives only in Akkadian, in Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian and Standard (Neo-Assyrian) versions. Etana himself appears in the Sumerian King List, and the story is set in the Sumerian city of Kish, but no Sumerian-language version of the epic is known.
Did Etana reach heaven?
The tablets do not say for certain. One flight ends in a fall, and a second flight reaches the gates of the gods before the text breaks off. Because the king list gives Etana a son, Balih, most scholars, including Stephanie Dalley, infer that he succeeded.
Why is the eagle punished in the Etana myth?
The eagle and the serpent swear before the sun god Shamash to protect each other's young. The eagle breaks the oath and eats the serpent's children, so Shamash helps the serpent trap it inside a wild bull's carcass, where the serpent cuts its wings and throws it into a pit.
Sources and further reading
- Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford World's Classics), which includes the standard English translation of Etana.
- Benjamin R. Foster, From Distant Days: Myths, Tales, and Poetry of Ancient Mesopotamia (CDL Press, 1995), and Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature.
- The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (University of Oxford), "The Sumerian King List", for the Etana and Balih entries and their manuscript variants.
- Thorkild Jacobsen, The Sumerian King List (University of Chicago Press, 1939), the classic edition of the list.
- Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales (2004), for tale type ATU 537.
